How to record a podcast remotely

Akshay Datt

host of Founder Thesis, with 400+ founder interviews and 1,000+ hours recorded.

To record a podcast remotely, use a platform that captures audio and video locally on each person’s own computer and uploads those files afterwards, instead of recording the compressed video call. Send every guest a setup checklist, keep each person on the recording page until their upload confirms, and run a second backup recording.

Local recording, also called a double-ender, is a recording method that captures each participant’s microphone and camera at full quality on their own machine while the call runs separately for conversation. The network never sits in the recording path, so a guest on a mediocre connection can still hand back a clean 48kHz WAV.

Local recording vs recording a video call

Recording a video call captures whatever survived the network; local recording captures each person at source. When two people talk over Zoom, Meet or Teams, the software continuously compresses audio and video to survive the connection. Bitrate drops when the connection tightens, frames are dropped, and the recording is a permanent record of the worst moments of the call. The ceiling is the connection, not the microphone.

In local recording, each participant’s browser records their own microphone and camera to their own machine at full quality. On Zencastr, each participant’s audio and video is backed up in their local browser storage and uploaded progressively while recording is in progress. Riverside uses the same design. The result is a separate high-quality track per person.

Cleanfeed, a browser-based remote recording service, is architecturally different. All recording happens at the host side, streaming Opus audio live. It is not a double-ender: the recording is made live, with nothing to sync up later. Its quality ceiling is tied to the connection, but there is no upload step to fail and nothing sitting in a guest’s browser waiting to be lost.

What if a guest closes the tab early?

The guest’s recording can be lost, because the high-quality file lives in their browser until it finishes uploading. Each participant should keep the recording page open until they each individually see a confirmation popup that their files have finished uploading. Not until the conversation ends. Not until the host says thank you. Until each person sees their own confirmation.

The causes of a lost track: a slow or unstable connection, a brief outage, a guest leaving before the confirmation appears, and a work, school or hotel network whose security settings block uploads.

Recovery has to be done by that participant, on the same computer and browser used during the original recording. A guest who clicks away and then flies home is a guest whose track may not come back.

Podcast recording backup files

A failed remote recording leaves a lower-quality cloud or internet-quality backup file, capped well below the local file. It rescues the audio podcast and rarely rescues the video podcast.

If video is the product, the fallback does not save the episode.

Best remote podcast recording platforms

The strongest remote podcast recording platforms are Riverside and Zencastr, which both record locally with per-person tracks, and Zencastr’s free tier carries unlimited separate-track recording and download. Riverside meters separate-track download hours on its paid tiers, and that hourly allowance is the number to check against your episode length.

SquadCast, a remote recording service, was acquired by Descript, announced on 15 August 2023. Descript will fully integrate SquadCast’s technology and wind it down as a standalone service, with no date given. SquadCast is still reachable and still offering a free trial.

Podcast guest checklist before the session

Send a guest checklist covering browser, headphones, connection, disk space and the upload confirmation. You cannot control a guest’s room, laptop, headphones or internet, and what they know before they sit down is where nearly all recoverable quality lives.

Subject: Recording details for [date, with time zone]

A few practical things so the recording comes out well. Setup takes about five minutes.

Before the day

1. Open the link in Chrome, Edge or Brave. Safari and Firefox are not supported by the recording platform. [Adjust to your platform’s stated requirements.]
2. Wear headphones. Any headphones. Without them, your speakers feed the other voice back into your microphone and it cannot be removed in editing.
3. Use a wired connection if one is available. If not, sit close to the router and ask anyone else in the building not to stream video during the session.
4. Check you have at least 10GB of free disk space. Your file is saved on your machine first, and a full drive means no recording.
5. Wired earbuds with an inline microphone beat a laptop microphone, which sits next to the fan and picks up the whole desk.

In the ten minutes before

6. Fully quit Slack, email, calendar and messaging apps rather than muting them. Phone on silent, screen down, in another part of the room.
7. Close every other browser tab and any video calls. Plug the laptop into power and turn off battery saver mode.
8. Sit in a room with soft things in it. A rug, curtains, a sofa or a bookshelf will beat a glass meeting room every time.
9. On video: put the light in front of your face, not behind you, and raise the camera to eye level.

The one thing that matters most, at the end

10. When the recording finishes, stay on the recording page until you personally see the message saying your files have finished uploading. If you close the tab before that, your track can be lost, and it can only be recovered from the same computer and the same browser.

A calendar hold with the link follows. If anything is unclear, reply and book a two-minute test the day before.

That two-minute test surfaces the wrong browser, the dead headphone jack and the corporate firewall while there is still time to fix them.

How to back up a remote podcast recording

Back up a remote podcast recording with a safety track alongside the platform. Three layers:

1. The platform’s own cloud or internet-quality backup. Automatic, and capped at 360p on Zencastr and 720p on Riverside.
2. A parallel recording by the host on a separate device or application. Independent of the platform, so it survives a platform outage.
3. The guest’s phone, running a voice memo, face down on the desk in airplane mode, started before the intro. Needs no software. Ask for it when the guest would be hard to rebook.

Running a manual double-ender rather than a platform adds one job: a marker. Count to three and have all the participants clap together or say “hello”. It gives an editor a hard sync point that takes seconds to find.

Remote recording problems and how to prevent them

Echo, laptop microphones, wifi and notifications, and sync drift cause most ruined remote episodes. Headphones, a wired connection and quit apps prevent most of them.

Echo. A guest without headphones sends the other voice out of their speakers and back into their microphone. Software echo cancellation is built for a single talker in a room and misfires elsewhere, most obviously when two people share one room on separate microphones, where it will try to cancel the other person’s voice. Headphones remove the problem physically instead of processing it away. Cleanfeed sells “No Headphones” and “Full repair” modes as paid Pro features.

Laptop microphones. They sit inches from a fan, on a hard desk, pointing at the ceiling. Wired earbuds with an inline microphone beat them, because the capsule moves off the desk and closer to the mouth. For a regular host buying a microphone, the Shure MV7+ has both USB-C and XLR outputs, so it survives a later upgrade to a proper interface.

Wifi and notifications. Zencastr asks for at least 5 Mbps and preferably 10 Mbps or more, 8GB of RAM and 10GB of free hard drive space for video sessions. Ethernet removes an entire category of incident. A muted messaging app still steals CPU and still fires visual interruptions that break a guest’s train of thought mid-answer, so quit them rather than muting them.

Sync drift on long recordings. Two machines’ audio clocks do not run at exactly the same rate, so tracks that line up at minute one can be apart at minute sixty. A sample-rate mismatch, such as a microphone running at 44.1kHz while the software assumes 48kHz, produces a much larger and more obvious speed error. This is mostly a manual double-ender problem, since platforms that record locally and hold a reference track handle alignment for you. Double Ender by Jason Snell, a free drift-correction tool, patches or removes areas of silence to offset the drift rather than simply aligning the start.

When to record a podcast in person instead

In-person recording is worth the cost when one trip covers several guests, when a guest’s seniority rules out a video call, when the format depends on people reacting in the same room, or when the video needs a cinematic multi-camera ceiling a browser cannot reach.

A remote platform works the same way whether the guest is in the next building or on another continent. In-person recording adds a studio booking, travel and everybody’s time on top.

• Several guests in one trip. One flight amortised across four or five recordings in two days is a completely different proposition from one flight for one guest. If you are travelling, fill the calendar before you book.
• A guest whose seniority makes a video call a non-starter. Some people will give you 45 minutes in their own building and would never have accepted a link.
• A format that depends on people reacting to each other in the same room. Panels, arguments, anything with overlapping speech or physical demonstration.
• A video ceiling you cannot reach through a browser. Cinematic multi-camera work with controlled lighting is not a remote product.

“It feels more personal” is not a reason on its own, and for a show measured on pipeline rather than production values, the effort is better spent on more episodes.

Frequently asked questions