We’re pleased to report that Descript 3.4 is now available for download! It’s our first release in a few months, and there’s a huge number of new features and improvements – watch the video above for the highlights, or read its transcript below.

Publishing & Audiograms

You can already share a Descript project via a link that opens in any browser, but sometimes – maybe to collect feedback, or to have a fixed long-term home for your creation – you just want to share a single Composition in your Project, and you don’t want it to keep changing as you edit. That’s why we built publish.

Click Share > Publish, and in seconds you’ll have a link you can share with whoever.  It loads fast, and looks great on both desktop and mobile.

You can also publish just a selection – and if you want, you can publish as an audiogram – a video visualization of your audio that’s great for social media or quickly sharing snippets with your collaborators.

Live transcription

Now when you record into Descript, we transcribe it live. This even works with multitrack recordings – so perfectly positioned speaker labels appear in real-time! Live transcription has three major benefits: First, you don’t have to wait for your file to transcribe after you’re done recording – it’s a huge productivity improvement. Second, it looks cool.

Third, you can actual edit WHILE you’re recording. For those of you who record voice talent, this is a huge deal – there’s never been anything like it, and it effectively lets you do all of your editing during the session without ever stopping recording – so you’ll walk out of your session with your recording edited and ready to go.

If you haven’t recorded into Descript yet, now is a great time to try.

Overdub

Third, we’ve made some really cool improvements to the way Overdub works. If you don’t know, Overdub is our AI voice synthesis that lets you type to generate audio in your own voice. We’ve completed the work integrating Overdub into the Descript editor. All you do is associate your Overdub Voice with a speaker label, and then, we automatically generate audio as you type!

We’re starting to increase the speed at which we’re granting new Overdub voices, so if you haven’t applied, now is a good time. There’s a new tab in the Project browser where you can request access to Overdub, and monitor your request position. Once you’re accepted, you can record and submit your training audio from the app. During this introductory period, Overdub voices are just $99 per year, and you’ll have a chance to play with your voice before you buy.

Quick Switcher

Next, we added a quick switcher. You might have seen these things in Slack and other apps, you press command K (ctrl K windows) and then type some stuff to quickly get around your project. You can type the name of a composition, markers within your composition, or just the time you want to jump to.

Other things

Here are some small ones that are still great and worth mentioning.

1) We now automatically add very short 5 millisecond crossfades to all edits. They’re so short, the only thing you’ll notice is that your edits are less likely to pop.
2) We added a new sidebar view for comments. From the sidebar you can sort by recency of comments, and also flip to see your archived comments.
3) We have some new keyboard shortcuts! We changed the Ignore keyboard shortcut to command delete, which is easier to remember and type.  Also, we added keyboard shortcuts for share, publish, and export – command shift S, P, and E, respectively. And when you invoke the shortcut, it’ll bring up the modal in the way you left it, making it nice and fast to publish and export a bunch of stuff.

Finally, there’s a ton of bug fixes, polish work, and performance improvements. Check the changelog for more details.

That’s it! Hope you have fun with this release – we’ll have another for you soon. What should we build? We’d love your feedback, head over to feedback.descript.com and tell us what to do. Thanks!