Hello, Riverside

Last week, I came across Riverside.fm¹, a tool that will now be part of my arsenal. It's going to be a new recurrent subscription that I'll opt into instead of paying for a Zoom license.

Zoom recently limited free 1:1 meetings to 40 minutes. This limitation only applied to meetings of three or more people before, and it now makes it impossible for me to record long-form interviews for the podcast using my free Zoom account. The price of Zoom paid plans starts at around $140/year, and for a bit more, I'm going to go for a tool that targets my workflow much better: Riverside.

A few years back, I looked at Soundtrap (later acquired by Spotify), which also serves to record remote podcasts. I don't think they supported video and local recordings, which are at the core of Riverside's offerings.

For $288/year, Riverside lets you record up to 4K², accept live call-ins from the audience, download separate tracks perfectly synchronized, and my killer feature, export the entire timeline into Descript as compositions and sequences.

A few minutes before writing these lines, I tested the free version with two people. I was able to record each person's webcam feed at 720p with synchronized audio and import the timeline into Descript. The tracks get automatically transcribed and named, and a Sequence is created for me with both tracks. I can quickly apply Studio Sound if I wanted, or I can download the original tracks, edit them in another software, and replace them in Descript's sequence.

I'm glad I learned about Riverside and didn't get a Zoom subscription. I don't plan on having 100-people events or meetings over Zoom, and I'm usually fine with meeting for less than forty minutes at a time or asking my invitees to re-join my meeting.

Hello, Riverside!