First, some background

A year and a half ago, I started Pinecast to create a better podcast hosting service. Most popular hosts left a lot to be desired, despite the relative simplicity of the task at hand. After dogfooding the initial versions of Pinecast for over six months with the help of friends, we slowly began releasing it to the public. It was more successful than we could have hoped, and we invested huge amounts of time into making it even better. Simultaneously, we discovered that there was far more work to do.

We found — while many of our day-to-day gripes were gone — there were still lots of problems with the podcast production process. The biggest issue, even today, is tooling around recording and editing episodes. In the podcast world, there are only a few widely-used recording and editing applications:

Audacity

GarageBand

Adobe Audition

iOS Notes (yes, really)

Audition is a great piece of software, but it’s also far outside the price range of an amateur looking to start a low-budget show. It also has far more features than a podcaster can ever need, most left unexplained or obfuscated with audio engineering jargon.

iOS Notes is an unacceptable means of recording something that you expect other people to listen to with their ears. “Production value” is a term that people using iOS Notes are unfamiliar with. I won’t say any more on the subject.

GarageBand comes preinstalled on most (all?) macOS computers, and has features for both recording and editing audio. GarageBand isn’t so good for podcasts, though. Its tools are mostly designed for musicians, and the features a podcaster would need (noise reduction, audio leveling, ability to make quick cuts across many tracks, etc.) are missing or non-obvious.

Audacity is the only real solution for most amateur podcasters. It’s free and open source, and probably does just about anything that Audition can (with the help of plugins). Audacity, though, isn’t a very good piece of software. The McElroy Brothers — some of the most successful podcasters — have had immeasurable trouble with Audacity. The list of known issues for the latest release is almost comical. Most insultingly, Audacity‘s worst and most frequent problems involve lost or corrupt audio.

What’s a podcaster to do? Well, this is where I got an idea.

Playing with a prototype interface

Pinecast Studio is a free and open source desktop application for recording, and soon, editing. Anyone can use it, whether they’re a Pinecast customer or not. The first release will include the most basic features possible:

Start and stop recording

Save the recording to WAV or MP3

Backup the recording to the cloud

Editing support will come in the second major release. Just solving the issues of recording reliability is a major hurdle to overcome.

The Pinecast Studio app is built on Electron, which is the same foundation that Slack, Discord, and the WhatsApp desktop clients use. Electron brings all the goodness of Chromium (the same base that Google Chrome uses) and Node (the same JavaScript engine that powers huge swaths of the web) together.

With the power of Chromium’s WebAudio API implementation, recording audio is trivial, streaming directly to the disk using Node’s fs API. Encoding PCM audio data as a WAV or MP3 file is also fairly trivial, with the help of some modules on NPM.

Where we’re at

We currently have a prototype version of Pinecast Studio’s recording functionality. In fact, we’ve recorded a whole podcast episode using Pinecast Studio to export MP3 files! As we use it, we’re adding more and more features to improve the process. For example, we can now automatically detect bad microphones:

Microphones that don’t produce audio or don’t respond will be flagged

The coming weeks will focus on:

Improving the UI, making it as simple and easy to use as possible

Improving performance and responsiveness of the encoders

Making the app rock-solid; adding safeguards against audio corruption and preventing data loss when a crash occurs

Our target for V1 is April of this year, initially launching for Windows and macOS, with Linux following soon thereafter. If you’re interested in getting updates, subscribe to our subreddit, where we post all of the juicy-good things that we’re working on.

We’re continuing to explore and experiment with audio editing. We’ve done some tests that have yielded very promising results. You’ll hear more about those results and any new developments as we continue to iterate.