Backfill · 2025
#203 of 383Podcast Editing App
Personal photo: laptop screen showing a podcast editing interface with a text transcript on the left, highlighted filler words in yellow, and a simplified audio waveform at the bottom.
I found a podcast editing app that lets me cut and rearrange audio by editing a text transcript rather than dragging waveforms. Deleting a sentence from the transcript and hearing it disappear from the audio felt like discovering a cheat code for a process that used to take me 3 hours per episode. App transcribes uploaded audio with enough accuracy that I only need to fix maybe 5 words per 20-minute recording. Filler word detection highlights every "um" and "uh" and "like" as a removable tag that I can delete with a single click. Looking more like a word processor than a traditional DAW, the interface makes the learning curve almost flat. That matters because I don't have time to learn Pro Tools just to clean up a conversation I recorded with a friend about design books. Export quality is high enough that listeners can't tell where the edits happened. Auto-leveling normalizes volume across speakers so I don't have to manually adjust the gain when 1 person was sitting farther from the microphone. I like that the tool treats spoken word as text first and audio second, because that inversion makes editing feel like a writing task rather than an engineering task. It means I spend my time making decisions about content rather than fighting with software.