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A new voice enhancement tool, Voice Regen, has been launched – but this one is different. It’s from Waves Audio, an Emmy® and Technical Grammy® Award-winning audio technology company, rather than a random guy with an AI account. The tool provides content creators with instant, professional-quality voice cleanup. It removes background noise, room echo, and fixes uneven volume. Pricing starts for free, but $4.99 currently gets WAV export and 300 minutes a month. It also does video.
- If you’d like to know what it sounds like – you’ve probably already heard it. The Podnews Weekly Review from Dec 19 included lots of individual pieces of bad-quality audio, recorded all over the world on laptop microphones, via AirPods, the tiny microphone on your headphone lead, or who knows how – some seemingly in bathrooms or echoey offices, others in low-quality low-resolution files. Testing the tool, we pushed them all through Voice Regen; and the sound is consistent throughout.
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Audioboom has signed Crooked Media for hosting, global distribution and network advertising sales. Audioboom will also represent host read ads within Pod Save the UK.
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In Australia, SXSW Sydney has been cancelled. It’s reported that the NSW government, which had part-funded the event in previous years, had pulled out (in spite of having signed a five year agreement). There were “two dedicated stages” for podcasts at the event last year.
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Crime Junkie is the biggest podcast in the US for audio reach, according to Podscribe’s January 2026 Podcast Industry Rankings. Good news for Audioboom – their show Bulwark is at #10 for downloads and views, while Pod Save America, which they now represent, is #10 in audio reach.
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Guests not being brilliant isn’t just something that affects smaller podcasts – Will Arnett says that one “very famous comedian” behaved so badly on the Smartless podcast, they cut him off after ten minutes. Another comedian recorded a whole show, but then decided that she didn’t want it to be released in case her quotes were taken out of context.
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Which self-improvement podcasts have the best-performing advertising? Oxford Road’s ORBIT study, based on $1.6bn in annual spend, tells us that The Anxiety Coaches Podcast with True Native Media gives the best bang for your buck. But, the self-improvement category is 8x more volatile than mental health shows – with much bigger swings between wild wins and massive misses.
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Podcast Nation has strengthened its relationship with UTA, signing three new shows: Outlore with Eleanor Neale, The Florence Given Show, and Petty Crimes.
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The IAB released “proposed draft legislation” to address AI scraping, which it says is urgently needed to protect the ad-supported publishing ecosystem.
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In the UK, YouTube has sent a legal letter to BARB, the UK television measurement service, requiring it to stop measurement of YouTube channels on smart TVs. That allowed BARB (which is roughly the equivalent to the US’s Nielsen) to report on sizes of individual channels, something that YouTube suggests breached its terms of service. (MrBeast, BARB reported, achieved 319,000 viewers in a week, details we’re apparently not allowed to know). The data was collected for BARB by Kantar Media, using audio matching recognition for 200 channels. None of YouTube’s data is compliant with IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines; and the company has never published what constitutes a “play” on the system.
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The Journey to Mastery podcast has launched an accompanying app – a daily formation app built for faith-driven entrepreneurs who listen to the show. Rather than offering more content, the app focuses on a simple daily rhythm of short prompts, reflection, and intentional focus, helping listeners apply the ideas they hear on the podcast in real life. The launch of the app coincides with creator and host Elzie Flenard III’s tenth year anniversary as a podcaster.
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Events: OnAir Fest has released its final schedule. The event is Feb 25-26 in Brooklyn, New York … The Paris Radio Show starts today, at La Bellvoise in Paris. Much of the event is free. Amongst the radio stuff is a live podcast track. It’s also on tomorrow.
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Podcast News – with Airwave
