Descript Season 5: SquadCast joins Descript. Easy, reliable remote recording + editing in one place

Reliable recording, AI editing — all in one place

Whether you’re making audio or video podcasts, whether they’re chat shows or fully scripted productions, Descript has become an essential tool for thousands of podcasts, including many if not most of the podcasts you listen to.

And while we’ve prided ourselves on being a tool that can handle all the different parts of your workflow, from script writing to recording to rough cuts to collaborative review to pulling highlights for social media, there’s one part of the process that we’ve always wanted to tackle, but didn’t because we were afraid — remote recording.

At this point, you’re probably either going, “yeah, totally,” because this has been your top feature request, or you’re like, “uh remote recording? ever heard of Zoom?” 

Of course we’ve heard of Zoom. It’s the only place a lot of our team ever sees each other; several of us met our spouses on Zoom. But to be clear, when we talk about “remote recording” we’re talking about a special class of tools that capture audio and video conversations by recording locally on everyone’s computer in full quality. Those recordings are then uploaded, so you get the highest quality even if someone’s internet glitches. 

Zoom doesn’t do that. It records in the cloud, so if the internet blinks for someone on your podcast, it won’t record what they were saying, and you’ll have no way to fix that other than edit it out. A lot of podcasters, if not most of them, want to make sure they don’t have those quality issues, so they use proper remote recording tools.

Back when the Coronavirus happened, we here at Descript were like, “Geez, a lot more podcasters are going to be remote recording, we should build it into Descript.” But here’s the problem: it’s harder than it seems. If you want podcasters to trust you with their recording sessions, you better be rock-solid reliable — and with everything else we were doing, we just never felt we were in a position to make the investment required to solve the problem correctly.

And it was a bummer, because remote recording has become a staple of every podcaster’s tool stack. And to make it part of your full-production stack, so as soon as you’re done recording, it would just show up in Descript ready to edit? That would be amazing.

About SquadCast

That brings us to SquadCast. If you haven’t heard of them, SquadCast is one of the original remote recording tools — they’ve been serving podcasters for seven years. If you ask us, they’ve built the most reliable remote recording tech out there.

They’re neighbors of ours in the Bay Area, and as we got to know them and gained an appreciation for the quality of what they’ve built and how well it complemented Descript, we decided to team up.

So we’re pleased to announce that SquadCast is now part of Descript. Now you can record your podcast, including video, with hosts and guests anywhere in the world, and have the entire recording waiting for you in Descript as soon as you’re finished. 

The reasons we’re joining forces with SquadCast go well beyond just remote recording. SquadCast gives you local recording in up to 4K video, so you and your guests are always captured in the highest quality, with automatic backups for each person, and no need to worry about internet glitches. 

It also works on mobile — which can make it so much easier on your guests, or on you, especially when you combine it with Descript features like Studio Sound. Say there’s a guest you’re struggling to schedule — now you can tell them to do the show in the car, walking the dog, sitting in an airport. SquadCast will capture the audio, and video if you want, and you don’t have to worry about their audio quality because Studio Sound will make it sound like they were in a soundproofed room on an expensive mic. 

Integration overview

Here’s some context on how the SquadCast-Descript integration is going to roll out. There will be two phases.

In phase one, SquadCast will remain a standalone service, with two main changes. The first is that we’ve really streamlined the integration with Descript. The second is around price. For paying Descript customers, you now get SquadCast for free. Phase one begins today.

In phase two, we’ll fully integrate SquadCast’s tech into Descript and wind it down as a standalone service. That means you’ll be able to make remote recordings from the Descript app, and have them ready to edit as soon as you’re finished. We’re working on this, but don’t have an exact date yet. Stay tuned for more on that in the coming weeks. 

That’s it for now. As always, if you have any questions, your best resource is probably our community. In Discord, at our live events, and on social media you can bring your questions and comments to us or to the legion of creators who use Descript. 

We’d love to hear from you, and we can’t wait to hear, and see, what you make with Descript.