I’m trying out a new tool to edit my podcasts – Descript! You should check it out: think of it as a Google Docs for podcasts. ;)Thanks Evo Terra for the recommendation!

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Transcript

[00:00:05] Hello there, Norman here, and welcome to, This Is Norm. This time, this episode will be a little bit different because I am trying out a new tool to edit this episode. It’s called Descript.

[00:00:16] Now, Descript is a very unique podcast editing tool in that it does not use the timeline as the main source of editing the show.

[00:00:26]It does have a timeline element, but if you know what a timeline is, you have the different channels where. All the different sources of sounds are coming out and you have speaker one on its own channel, speaker two on its own channel between, do we call it layers? I’m not sure I call it channels.
[00:00:39] Normally for any standard DAW or digital audio workstation, you’d have multiple channels on a timeline and that’s it. But Descript does it very differently. What Descript does is that you have sort of like a word processor layout happening or appearing in front of your screen.

[00:01:00] Reminds you a little bit about Google docs.
[00:01:02] At least it does for me, and you can edit the show from the very text or transcriptions that come out of every recording uploaded on Descript, which means that you can edit a podcast episode like you would update or edit a Google doc. That’s really fascinating. So I have been trying it out, I’ve heard so much about it.
[00:01:23] Especially after hearing about it from Evo Terra, who is a prominent podcaster or a prominent voice in the podcasting industry. I decided to try it out and you know, I had some spare time to just check out a new tool, but I got hooked on it because I finally understood the layout after playing around with the tools for the first time.

[00:01:42] So here is me trying this out. Some advantages include. Clarity over responses in trying to figure out the pauses between different conversations. You can’t really tell what the sound waves on a normal DAW represent. It could be a cough, it could [00:02:00] be something really important, but it looks like a filler word.

[00:02:04]You won’t be able to see the words on the timeline if it was a standard DAW, but on Descript, without even looking at the timeline, you can tell what the next person is going to say. So Descript is pretty good for lots of conversational podcasts in that if you have importance on the transcript, I think that it would fit really, really well there. So far it’s still a little bit finicky. I still need to get used to it.

[00:02:29] I wished there was a horizontal scrolling feature. I’m a huge Audacity person, which I use a shift mouse scroll wheel to move left and right down the timeline. I’m having some problems layering music on top of empty tracks. Sometimes there are some problems there, but other than that, I can see the potential and I will stick with it for the time being.

[00:02:51] So let’s see what will happen. And of course, this episode is on Descript, so check it out and much thanks to Evo Terra [00:03:00] for the recommendation on this tool. And I will see you tomorrow.