Descript

Descript is a strong collection of audio tools that just weren't available when I started making podcasts. The ability to organise, collaborate and publish an audio project in the cloud with a friendly interface is great and used to be a huge pain to figure out. Editing audio with the transcript and the waveform at the same time allows you to skip a bunch of technicalities and focus on your creativity. Video capabilities expand the possibilities, and the overall suite of tools make me rethink entirely what podcast editing can or should be in a good way.

Stability is the biggest problem I have with this. After working on about a lot of different projects with different collaborators, I'm still coming up against things that make it freeze, make it crash, or break a project (usually salvageable at least), and end up needing to work around issues to keep things rolling.

Also, while Descript has a lot of features, in comparison to any long-standing audio software it leaves so much to be desired. There are many missing tools that would add a lot of room for creativity and technical cleanup. Things like audio meters, noise gate, spectrum analysis, filters to automate creatively, ducking, but also the more unexpected effects like reverb, stereo delay, pitch shifting, layered FX, these are all things podcasters of any kind might want to use for effect at some point and many folks I know can't, or don't want to tell their stories without them.

This is especially true for video which misses on some basic transformations like rotation for text and images.

The ability to edit an interview or podcast just by editing the text is incredible.
The workflow is fairly straight forward – import audio file, choose how to transcribe, wait…, edit the transcript & audio in various ways, export or publish as needed.

The automated transcription is good, but not great. There are always little errors that seem obvious to a human – capitalize the first letter in a sentence, don't capitalize a word in the middle of a sentence, abbreviate doctor as Dr. when a name follows, etc. – and they seem to always show up, even when they've been corrected previously, so it's unclear whether the 'machine' is actually 'learning'.
The app appears to not be built as a native app for macOS which means it lacks certain core features. The most annoying to me is that the window always opens in the default size (i.e. small) and never remembers the sizing or positioning that I choose every time I open it.
The developers are rapidly adding features, but almost too quickly. Once I get used to a feature or function, it doesn't take long for the menu item to be changed or moved (Share, Export, Publish all do similar–though different–things, and have each had their turn as a unique menu item or being grouped together in various ways). I got very efficient at correcting the transcription (which, unfortunately, must be done frequently) until they changed the entire process of editing the transcript.

It's very easy to use as a novice. There are lots of functionality buried within that I know I'm not utilizing, but I don't need it to get my job done. I love the ability to edit the audio by editing text and adding music onto my podcast voice files is straightforward. This is by far the easiest editing tool I've tried.

There are lots of features that I know exist but that I don't see or that I don't know how or when I should use them. This is on me to learn, but I do wish tools would provide access to mini-tutorials from within the main workspace so that when you are working you could better identify whether that functionality you've never used might help to solve your problem.

This software utilizes the experience of using a word processor, and harnesses it to help make an editing process that is intuitive, easy, and efficient. This makes it a time saver for me, and I have been able to teach non-design and non-tech colleagues how to use it in order to share the production work across various projects with ease.

Initially, the transcript and audio functions worked excellently, while the video was still a but rough. Now, though, Descript has spent several months upgrading and updating their platform so that the video editing is much more seamless and more can be done through the platform to produce great videos. The overdub is clever and helpful, but requires quite a bit of honing to get high-quality results.