I produce a weekly podcast and I'm slowly trying to improve my mixing and editing skills to make it sound as good as possible.

The podcast is recorded with me and my co-host in the same room, which results in some background noise from the other person being picked up by the mics, as well as normal background noise from air conditioning, computers etc.

Normally, I apply a noise reduction (I'm using Reaper to record and edit) after recording when I'm editing the show by looping a section without talking and using an automatic reduction to mostly get rid of hiss and other background noise.

Recently, however, I've been pointed at the idea of a Noise Gate to further help with background noise and it seems like it would help with mics picking up the other person talking, knocking the table etc.

I understand the concept of a noise gate, but I'm struggling to work out at which point I should apply it, during recording, or after during editing.

I can see pros and cons for both methods so I wanted to get an idea of what some more experienced people thing.

For the record, my master track effects generally end up like:

* EQ (using a male vocal preset to reduce the low end a bit)
* Compressor
* Limiter