You are a master of your DAW. You know all the keyboard shortcuts. You've even splurged on a boutique plate reverb plugin. You look Descript and think that it’s got some cool tricks, but it’s not going to replace your DAW. You’re right.
Descript doesn’t want to replace your DAW. In this post, you’ll learn how producers from NPR, Gimlet, VICE, New York Times, and other top creators are making audio production faster and more collaborative by using Descript to compliment their DAW.
Descript’s most important feature for audio professionals is the last one you’ll use: Timeline Export. This allows you to transfer your session to Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, or most other DAWs, with the original files untouched and the edits in tact - as if you’d done the whole thing in DAW.
That means you can take advantage of Descript’s powerful tools for organizing tape, creating rough cuts, and collaboration, before switching over to your DAW for mixing and mastering.
Descript was originally created for public radio producers who knew the pain of spending countless hours logging tape. With features like Clip to Composition and Copy Highlights, Descript makes even easier to pull selects from your tape than using a word processor.
Trying to find the spot where your interview subject talked about something specific? Search across many files at once, and even copy all the results (and their enclosing sentences) into a new document.
If you’re working, for example, on a scripted podcast with a narrator that talks around your tape, you can use Descript to compose your narration. With Overdub, our ultra realistic voice cloning technology, the text will turn into audio as you type, in your narrator’s voice.
While you may not want to use synthetic audio in your final project, it allows you to create a fully listenable draft that you can use to get feedback from collaborators, so you can push voice recording to later in the production process and waste less time retracking edits.
Speaking of editorial feedback, since Descript features Google Docs-style live collaboration, members of your team can leave comments, make edits, and rearrange Projects in real-time. All of the original files in your Descript Project are synced to the cloud and managed automatically, so if a team member (or you) accidentally messes everything up, fixing it is just a few clicks away.
— Eliza Smith, Cosmic Standard
