Descript’s Podcast Studio launches: we try it out

Descript has released Podcast Studio, a podcast editor that works like a word processor. It’s free for the first three hours of transcription - and today’s episode of Podnews’s podcast is edited using it: see me trying it out for the first time on YouTube. (Opinion: it’s astonishing).

• Descript has also launched Overdub, a way for you to “correct your voice recordings by typing”, using artificial intelligence to reconstruct your voice. It’s worth giving the demo a go. It’s a carefully-designed tool that only works on your own voice, not other people’s - so you can’t use it for deepfakes of the US President saying ludicrous things, for example.

• Infinite Dial South Africa was released yesterday, covering “major metro commercial population” in the country. Just 10% of metro South Africans listen to podcasts per month (33% of US; 22% of Australia).

• Breaker, a social podcast app, is now available for Android users in beta. It will import your subscriptions from other podcast apps, and is free. Here it is on Android, and on iOS. Listen to Podnews in Breaker.

  
  Aug 17 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Wisebuddah and Acast have announced the winner of the UK’s first ever podcast talent competition, LaunchPod. Surer and Saredo Mohamed, from On Things We Left Behind, will now have an entire series professionally produced, launched and marketed.

• What’s the best microphone for podcasting? 1,372 podcasters have contributed to this WhatPods survey - the one we use is #7.

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• PodcastGuests is celebrating over 15,000 users. The service launched three years ago and connects podcasters with expert guests for their shows.

• Maggie McGuire, the CEO of Pinna, an ad-free children’s audio network, talks to Podcast Movement. They advertise themselves, though: “We’re running advertising across audio networks including Spotify, Pandora, and NPR, and across podcast networks like Megaphone and Midroll.”

  
  Aug 17 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Amy Eason, a podcast producer at CNN, describes how they use 'audiograms’ - short visual clips of podcasts - on social media.

Podcast Revenue

• Podcasts are great for advertising because people trust the voices they hear, says Sophie Harding in Mediatel.

Podcasts

Spreaker Prime: Gone Cold is a true crime show that explores unsolved homicides and missing persons cases throughout the state of Texas, aiming to provide the victims and their families with a voice. They’re using Spreaker Prime to earn money and cut their hosting costs.

Morning Brew, a popular daily newsletter, has launched its first podcast, Business Casual. It’s a new weekly show, hosted by business editor Kinsey Grant, starting next week: Morning Brew itself claims 1.5m readers (and we were getting excited about hitting 10,000). (ART19)