Today we’re releasing our biggest update to Descript so far this year. There are five things, each of which on its own is a big deal.

Studio Sound 1.0

If you’ve yet to hear about Studio Sound, it’s Descript’s AI-based take on noise reduction and audio enhancement. We released it in beta last month, and many people (including us, actually) were surprised by how good it is:

Today, Studio Sound is graduating from beta, and we’re adding a few handy improvements. First, you can turn it on as a default setting for new recordings, either in the editor or in Descript’s screen recorder. Second, we added an intensity dial, so you can fine tune the strength of the effect. Finally, you can control it from the normal effects menu in the inspector, so you can tweak it without leaving your Composition.

One more Studio Sound demo: If you were looking for another reason to use Descript’s screen recorder, listen to what a difference it makes to have Studio Sound:

Full suite of audio effects

In addition to Studio Sound, we’re releasing over a dozen new audio effects to give you the same level of mixing and creative control that you’d expect in a DAW.

We have mixing effects, like a compressor, a limiter, and ducking. We have creative effects like reverb, pitch shifting, distortion, and a flanger. Each effect has easy to use presets, or if you know what you’re doing, you can drill in and tweak the knobs and dials to your liking.

Descript had a few effects before (compressor and equalizer), but with these effects, podcasters have the full set of tools necessary to get whatever sound they want.

New and improved Overdub

We’ve made our most substantial improvement to Overdub voice quality ever, eliminating a “wobbliness” issue that’s affected many voices since launch. You can hear the before / after here:
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Our Stock Voices should sound better now, and if you want to improve your own Voices, just hit the “Update to Overdub 3.0” button in the Overdub Tab.

We’ve also made it way easier to setup a Descript voice - you can create a voice from recordings in an existing composition in Descript (instead of recording a long script) and start creating Overdub placeholder text immediately (we’ll automatically generate once your voice is trained).

Video player with interactive transcript + Slack integration

Our embeddable video player now has an interactive, searchable transcript. Check it out:

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Once you get used to it, you’ll have a hard time living without it on all of your non Descript videos.

We’ve also partnered with Slack to make our videos play inline. We're also releasing a Slack app so you can get Descript notifications in Slack.

Editor improvements

We redesigned the inspector. As you’re clicking around your script, you’ll either see an inspector for the relevant clip(s), or if you click on a boundary between clips, you’ll see a transition inspector, which you can use to add fades and crossfades. This makes it easier to control your Composition without needing to switch to the timeline view.

You can also change the length of a track directly from the script - you can see the endpoint, and just click and drag to move it. You can also change the length of gaps between words from the toolbar.

We’ve also made a number of small but meaningful improvements to the timeline. Drag and drop works better, resizing works better, pin offset is less weird, and you can paste attributes now.

Misc

• We've added a new publishing integration for podcasters, with Transistor, to help you get your content where it needs to go.