Speaker 1: When you think about podcast editing, it probably looks like this, with multiple tracks on a screen. But today, there's a newer option called Descript that lets you see the transcript of your audio, and by modifying the words on a screen like a Google Doc, you'll actually edit the audio itself. So today, I'm really excited to take you behind the scenes and give you a demo of this tool so that you can decide if recording and editing in Descript could be right for you. Hey, I'm Melissa, and welcome back to Wit & Wire, where we help creators turn their skills and passions into profitable online businesses. I'm so excited to give you a demo of Descript today. This tool is so different from all of the other editing options in the podcasting universe, and that's why I think it'll be a really great fit for some hosts. If you'd like, you can follow along with me by starting your own free trial of Descript at witandwire.com or find the link in the description. Overall, my goal with this demo is to first show you how you can record using Descript, then I'll show you how you can import audio if you've already done a recording, then we'll get into some of the editing tools and adding music and all of the classic things that you would hope an editing tool could do, before I end by sharing some of the cooler effects and tools that really only Descript is capable of. So with all of that in mind, let's dive in. Whether you've already recorded audio or you want to record using Descript, you'll begin by clicking New Project on the top right and giving it a title, which you can change at any time. So we'll go with the Creative Episode 4. And now you can see we have two different options for our audio. You can either click the microphone on the top to start recording, or you can import tracks. If you do use the recording feature, you'll want to click the gear icon to make sure that it's actually using the correct microphone. So I can see that mine is correct. It's using the Shure MB7. And you can actually add additional speakers too, using the plus sign. And Descript has an integration with Zoom if you want to record remotely. I'm going to go ahead and click the X button for now. And instead of doing a recording, I'm going to show you how to import audio. So you can actually see here that you could just drag and drop in your audio files, or you could click the Choose a File button. Or finally, you could click the plus sign here to add a voice file. Or if you had music, which we'll get to later on, you could add a track. So I'm going to go ahead and import not one, but two voice files to represent my voice and a guest from a previous podcast episode. The two files are starting to import. And if you are prompted to transcribe them, you'll want to click OK, because that is the main way that we'll do our editing. So you can give your speakers different names so that when they show up, you know who is who. And then because I uploaded two files at once, you'll notice I've been prompted to combine those two files into a multitrack sequence. That is what you want if your files play at the same time instead of chronologically. So to give you an example, Desola and I are in the same conversation. I'm talking on one track, she's talking on the other. So we definitely want to combine them into a multitrack sequence, as opposed to if I had just recorded two pieces of audio and then they went one after the other. I'm going to click Done. But just know that when you are waiting for your transcription in Descript, if you have audio up to an hour, it could take two to three minutes to transcribe. These are pretty short clips, so it's actually already done. Now I'm going to close this sidebar so we can really see the main part of Descript's projects. We have the top section, which shows a transcript, and the bottom, which shows an audio waveform. But what's cool about Descript is that you can actually edit the podcast in the transcript section, or you can still get into the audio section if you want to get a little bit more detailed. Before we get into editing, I still want to talk a little bit about transcription, because in Descript, you can just use the transcript as a written text document, and you can export it to use in your marketing and on your website. So if you wanted to just change the words instead of modifying the audio file, what you could do is highlight the text, and you'll notice you're being prompted here with the E shortcut to correct it. So if this wasn't the correct word, you could just go ahead and type in a new one. And there are some pretty cool tools where Descript will help automatically detect some errors that they think are in your transcript. So you could go through that one by one and see if you had some additional typos. That's optional. You don't have to correct the transcript, nor do you have to use it. The last thing I'll say about the transcript before we move into editing is that you may notice that there are already some words like ums and kind of that have blue lines under them, and that's because those are potentially filler words. And after we do some manual editing, I'm going to show you some really cool ways that you can use Descript's AI to start automatically removing some of those filler words, which is pretty cool. So now that we've gone through recording and importing audio, and we've talked a little bit about the traditional kind of transcription, let's get into the real magic of Descript, which is editing your audio file by editing the on-page transcript. Something that I noticed right off the bat is that this first sentence shouldn't actually be here. This is me telling Desola, the guest, that I will be recording the bio later. So in Descript, you can just highlight the text and click delete. It's that simple. You'll notice along the bottom that it actually edited the audio file as well. And I do want to just briefly undo that to show you that you could choose to ignore that line as well. Ignoring still removes the audio from your final edited episode, but visually now you can actually see where it was. And if that's helpful for you, then it's kind of nice to see it visually. But whether you choose to ignore with a strikethrough or delete with a backspace, I want you to know that Descript uses what's called non-destructive editing. That means in the future, if you needed to bring this audio back, you would be able to. And even in the original file, if I hover near the beginning and start to drag this to the left, even though it's going off screen, you can see that I'm able to do that because Descript has retained all of the information in the original audio. So rest assured that none of the decisions that you make are truly permanent. As you could start to scroll through this episode, what you might want to do in order to really get into editing is click play at the top and then listen to hear where are there errors or where are there filler words. And I'm going to go ahead and skip to right here, and I'm going to use my mouse to click right at the beginning of the sentence, and you can hear what Desola says. So kind of go with me here. That sentence, so kind of go with me here, is a sentence I could consider, again, highlighting and then backspacing. And then I just want to show you again on the bottom, you can actually see this gray area is where the audio has been selected. And when I click the backspace button, it has now made a cut in the audio, but it cut a little bit too close. Let's say now this word industry just goes a little too quickly into the word it. A helpful tip that you could implement is you could right click in the audio, and sometimes it's helpful to insert a gap clip. By default, this includes one second of silence, but you could click on this and then using the select tool, you could start to shorten the length of this silence just to make it sound more natural after you remove something from the text. There may also be times where you would just prefer to edit in the waveform along the bottom. So let's say I scrolled a little bit further down in the recording, down a little bit closer to the end of this phrase. Maybe this pause between words is just a little bit too long, and I wanted to manually adjust it. What you could do is switch over to the blade tool or use the B button. And then if you hover over the audio waveform and you click, you can see that it's created a split in the wave. And now if you hover your cursor over the left or the right side, you can choose to click and then shorten this just a little bit. And you could see how you could now manually go through this episode and using either the blade tool or the highlight text and delete option that you could really start to edit this episode just the way that you like it. Now that we've made an edit in the waveform, it's pretty subtle, but you may notice that right before this word and there's actually a gray dotted line. And that can show you where you've made edits. So as you scroll through the transcription, anytime you see any of these small gray cursors, that's where you've made edits. If you want to move pieces of audio around, that's equally simple to do. You could highlight this entire paragraph. And then just as you would in a Word document, you could click command X or control X to cut. And then maybe I wanted it to go up here. I could hit enter and then paste it. And now I am moving individual audio clips around. And although there may not be a good example for that within one episode, if you are doing multiple recordings, you can actually cut and paste text from different Descript projects. So you could be combining different pieces of audio from different recordings all into one project. And if you're doing a narrative podcast, that is a pretty cool feature, especially because narrative podcasts use transcription so much in their production process. And this makes it even simpler. Now, I mentioned that Descript does a couple of cool things that no other editing tools that I know of can do. And here are two of them under this wrench tool dropdown menu. One is to shorten word gaps and the other is to remove filler words. So if you click shorten word gaps, you'll notice at the top that it's searching within the composition. That's another word for the project that we're working on. And you can set a length. I want to find any word gaps longer than two seconds or maybe longer than one second and hit enter. And now you can see that Descript has found all gaps that fit my criteria. And you could either go through them one by one to listen or you could decide to be bold and shorten all of them to a certain length. There is no one right word gap length to look for or to shorten to. It really matters more on the individual person's speech patterns. But I definitely like to shorten pauses in my recordings just so that the audio flows really smoothly. I'm going to click out of the word gap tool and move into the filler word tool, which is, I think, a favorite for a lot of Descript users. Admittedly, this is a paid feature, but I want to show you what it's about. You can see that already it has found filler words within this recording and it's found quite a few. I am not a big believer in removing every single filler word. But what you can do is click at the top to decide which filler words you'd like to remove or you could deselect this checkbox. And maybe you only want to remove certain filler words like ums or maybe repeated words. And then the list will shorten just a bit. I think it would be probably a bold choice, but you could go ahead and replace all of them by applying either a delete or an ignore. And remember, delete means that the text will no longer be visible in your doc. Ignore will put a strikethrough through the text the way you can kind of see in this first sentence behind the tool on the left. But both of them will remove the audio from the final episode edit that you're working on. I think I prefer to listen through a few of them. But if you just know you want the shortest possible editing time and you really don't like filler words, then you can go ahead and apply to all. And I would recommend replacing with a gap clip just because sometimes it sounds unnatural to remove a filler word because it'll sound like the speaker is just breezing right into the next word. So there is a little bit of an art to the editing here. Now let's pretend at this point we had cleaned up most of the text. Before we add music, I want to show you some additional tools along the right. You can see we haven't gotten to the clip inspector, where if you click into some of your audio, you can adjust the actual audio quality by getting into dynamics, EQ, and a few other tools. But there's one really neat feature in Descript I want to show you called Studio Sound. So I'm actually going to click back into the overall project and going into the original file called Desola. Once you can get into here, you'll see there's an effect called Studio Sound. And even this help text is telling us that this is Descript's AI enhancement to remove things like background noise, echo, and other distracting sounds. And especially depending on your guest's quality of recording, this can really enhance the overall tone and speech for their track. Let's start with a quick before by hitting play. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. That sounds all right. But let's go back a little bit, move the cursor to the beginning, and now let's turn on Studio Sound. Okay, after a little processing, you can see you have the option to turn this on or off, or you can change the intensity of how much the effect is applied. But let's hear how it sounds at 100%. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. This guest had a pretty high gain on her initial recording. So I would probably play around with this and then head back into the original recording to see how I could make it sound as professional and polished as possible. But I love this feature and I hope that you do too. We still aren't quite done. I'm going to head back into the overall project called Episode 4 because we still need to add some music before we're ready to go. Let's say at the very beginning, I want to add our theme song. So I'm going to put my cursor at the beginning of the track. And I know it's a little confusing since we deleted, or we ignored, I should say, some text. But let's click the plus sign and go ahead and add a track. And I'm going to add the theme music. Perfect. The music has been added. And you'll notice this one looks a little bit different. First of all, it looks like a little speaker icon in blue. And I can see the file along the audio in the bottom. And I'm going to make this a little bit taller. And we are at the very beginning of the track. But a lot of times, you actually want the music to come in sooner. So if I click the Select icon, I can click on this music and drag it in any direction so that it starts a little bit before. But if you run into issues, like I just did, where it doesn't go all the way back, I found that sometimes it helps to right-click and to add a gap clip at the beginning, the way that we've done in the past, where this is just inserting blank sound. Because you'll notice, as I start to move the music around, you see that blue line that's now hovering over the gap clip? I think it needs something to hold on to. So I found that that works out a little bit better. And then you can shorten the gap clip. So let's hit play. And obviously, the text doesn't quite line up with the way that you would want it to sound. But the last thing I want to share about editing the music track is that once this track is selected, along the right, it can be helpful to change the volume up or down so that your levels are even between the music and the vocal speaking tracks. And on top of that, you can hover over the beginning of a music track to shorten it like this. Or if you hover along the top, you can fade it in. Or at the end, you can fade it out in just the same way, like this. So let's hear how that fade sounds at the end. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I cannot wait to dive in. And to start off, we won't listen to the whole audio track. Of course, this isn't quite ready to go. But let's pretend at this point, you were ready to export your audio. You'll have the option to click share here at the top, where you can download the file and publish it in your hosting platform. There are a few more helpful tools in Descript to point out. Things like the conductor, which brings up a shortcut menu and helps you move around a little bit more quickly. Also going back here, you can see version history. So Descript files save automatically, and you can always go back to a prior version. You can also duplicate a project. So if you create a version that has your intro and your outro ready to go, you can always duplicate it. Or let's say you edit your intro in one file. You can literally come in here and copy and paste it like this into a new project if you're working on it. So there's so much that you can do that we don't have time to get into today. Another amazing feature is called the transcript glossary. So let's say the name of your business or your name get misspelled pretty often. You can add those terms to the transcript glossary. So Descript always gets it right. And then yet another Descript feature, unlike anything I've heard before, is called Overdub. I'm not going to do a full Overdub demo, but the way that it works is that you can train Descript to know what your voice sounds like. So that later on, if you needed to update something in the audio file, you could actually just type it in and Descript will read it as your voice. So let's say I had already set this up. If I went into my episode, we're going back into episode four. Let's say I didn't say something correctly or I needed a different transition. You could just come in here and type something and then Descript will read it as though it's you. It's pretty wild. If that's something you're interested in learning more about, leave me a comment below this video. But there are so many features in Descript, I couldn't possibly pack them all into one demo. But hopefully this gives you a sense of just how unique the editing features and the recording features in Descript are. And even though we were only talking about podcasting, there are also video recording and editing tools as well. So the possibilities are endless. If you're thinking about launching your own podcast, but you aren't sure where to start, you can grab our free podcast launch checklist in the Description or you'll find it at witandwire.com checklist. I hope this has been a helpful demo as you evaluate different editing and recording options for your podcast. And if you haven't already, before you go, make sure you subscribe to Wit & Wire channel so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos. I'm Melissa and it's been such a pleasure teaching you a little bit more about this newer tool. I'll see you next time.