Is It Worth It?

Matt Cundill  0:00  
It is the June edition of the podcast, Super Friends. My name is Matt Cundill. I am coming to you live from the province of Quebec, Canada, and we're joined by a couple friends here today. Normally, we've got five, we've got three today, and they'll introduce themselves starting now.

Jon Gay  0:17  
John Gay from Jag Podcast Productions, lovely Berkeley, Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Catherine O'Brien  0:23  
Hello everybody, this is Catherine O'Brien, podcast producing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Matt Cundill  0:29  
Johnny Podcast was going to join us today, but he said he was called out to a fire. Now, when he says that, does that mean he's putting out a fire that's pertaining to work, that we assume that that's I assume

Jon Gay  0:41  
either client or baby related, I'm not sure which.

Matt Cundill  0:44  
Thank you, that's what I thought too, but

Catherine O'Brien  0:46  
I trust I trust Johnny just to be able to handle almost any situation that comes up. So we agree

Jon Gay  0:52  
on that.

Catherine O'Brien  0:52  
Yeah,

Matt Cundill  0:53  
yeah, I generally expect that he could get a job like that done in about 10 minutes. So, and David, yes, he could be joining us just about at any time, because I know he never misses an opportunity to promote the stuff that he does, but I'm glad we're doing this today. So normally we would do this on Streamyard, we'll get into that shortly, and why I've ditched Stream Yard, and we've moved ourselves over to something else we're testing out here called called One One Stream, One Stream. Thank you.

Catherine O'Brien  1:20  
Let's not tank our sponsorship before we even get started here,

Matt Cundill  1:25  
and so we'll talk about some of the things, some of the tools that we use, because you know this does feel like we're trying something new just to see if it works, and we're not even going to try out all the all the toys in the box here today, but Jag, one of the things that you emailed back to us today, and when I said, what do you, what are the things that you're thinking about that when you're doing podcasting is the download, so talk a little bit about that, and we'll see if we can solve that problem.

Jon Gay  1:52  
I don't think it's anything we're going to solve today, but I know we've talked a little bit about this offline, and you know, for years the metric for all things podcasting was to download how many people were gonna listen to your show, and that had a number of problems as podcasting involved, including bots, which is, you know, not completely, but largely been filtered out. But the problem is a download only measures, depending on which platform we're talking here, generally only measures who pulled your show down out of the ether or the RSS feed, depending on how you want to phrase it. The problem is it may automatically download if you're subscribed to the show. The person may never view or listen to your content. The real better metric, as we've seen, is consumption, as Matt would sell you in radio terms, we'd call that TSL, time spent listening. Did somebody download your show and just listen for a couple minutes and say this isn't for me, or do they stay through, you know, 8090 95% of your show until you said, hey, we're leaving, bye bye, last question. So you really want to dive into how much time people are spending with your show, or is there anything in particular in your show where you're looking at that graph and it just falls off a cliff? Could that be a commercial, an ad, could it be a feature of your podcast that your audience just isn't really feeling? Could it be something offensive your host or your guest said, something like that. So you really want to kind of go into the deep dive on the analytics and Apple and Spotify in YouTube and see how long people are listening, not just they clicked on your show.

Matt Cundill  3:21  
Catherine, do you have any solutions to this to solve all the world's problems in five minutes?

Catherine O'Brien  3:26  
I, as I have said privately to this podcast, Super Friends, that I'll now share with our incredible audience, I have a personal fatwa against discussing this topic. I think this is just, could not be more boring, I think. It is just, it is totally reprehensible that we are, how many years into podcasting, and this is still a topic. I actually think that for the average podcaster, this is really never going to be a problem, because as we have been discussing podcasting, is a, is a niche market for a niche audience, which is, once you know those things, can be a very helpful thing to know. I think that the much better metric that you should use, if you're a podcaster, is is the audience that you've cultivating doing the thing that you want them to do. Do you want them to follow you on social media? Do you want them to sign up for your email newsletter? Do you want them to interact with you? Do you want them to engage in some other way? I think that's for the, for the average podcaster, that's going to be it. I just, I just cannot get excited about talking about this 10 years on,

Jon Gay  4:37  
really, because you sound kind of fired up,

Catherine O'Brien  4:39  
except to, except to be a pill about it, and be the podcasting heel that I sometimes am.

Matt Cundill  4:45  
So, I'd love that you're fired up about it, but I also think we have a responsibility to talk about this, because of all the information, misinformation that's out there about this. I'll give an example. All that

Jon Gay  4:55  
fake news.

Matt Cundill  4:56  
Yeah, well, I asked somebody, I said, would you come on my podcast? And they said, well, how many downloads do you have,

Jon Gay  5:03  
which is a standard boilerplate question to ask.

Matt Cundill  5:07  
Yeah, but does it really matter if I have 100 downloads and my audience is about, you know, an industry podcast about about broadcast, and that person were, say, in broadcasting, wouldn't that be an automatic yes? It doesn't really matter if I have 100 because if you go on a show with 1000 downloads and they don't have any broadcast professionals listening, you've done yourself a disservice,

Catherine O'Brien  5:30  
right. Well, this is the, this is the niche that we were, I was just mentioning, is that in podcasting, one of the great things is you could have an audience of 100 if it's the 100 right people, then you can do almost anything that you want to do. I mean, that could, you could actually have a business proposition from having a small audience if they're the right people. So, I think that your point is really well taken, Matt. If you have the niche of broadcasters to podcasters, that is a specialized audience, and if you're tapping into it, and you can put people in front of that audience, that it's going to be meaningful. That's the real gold of podcasting. I, and I know, I know, because I also have a, an ego. I, of course, I want massive numbers of downloads, but I would rather have engagement, and people doing the thing, an audience doing the things that we're asking them to do, that is going to be more valuable.

Jon Gay  6:25  
Love and counterpoint

Matt Cundill  6:27  
is

Jon Gay  6:28  
you did say engagement, somebody listening and spending more time with you would be one form of engagement.

Matt Cundill  6:34  
True.

Jon Gay  6:35  
And to your point, a moment ago, Catherine, the analogy I always give to new clients is the basket weaving analogy, the old joke about the college class of basket weaving 101 If you had a podcast about basket weaving, you might get 100 people that are going to listen to it, but if you are a basket company, I bet you'd pay decent money to get in front of 100 people that care enough about basket weaving to listen to a podcast about

Catherine O'Brien  7:03  
it. I agree. I actually, I decline your loving counterpoint, because I think that is a complimentary point. I don't think that's a counterpoint

Jon Gay  7:11  
sustained.

Matt Cundill  7:12  
I'll move over into a territory that Jag touched on in his latest podcast episode, and it has to do with Spotify, but one of the things that I did with my network last year is I measured 2025 against 2024 and we had a decrease in downloads for Spotify of 25% and the reason is because of video, and people started to upload their video to Spotify, and those no longer count as downloads, and Jag, you talked a lot about this recently, when it came to Spotify, and the many different ways to count, and it's being a problem.

Jon Gay  7:51  
Well, yeah, and this is in the podcast, The Jag Show. Since Dave's not here to promote his podcast, I'll promote mine. If you upload, I mean, Spotify, the title of the episode is Beware of the Siren Song of Spotify, and one of the two siren songs of Spotify, in addition to their hosting, we can touch on that later, but it's the idea that, hey, well, you can put your video on Spotify, people, if people are following your show on Spotify, why have audio when you can have video too? Well, the problem with that is the audio will count toward your downloads, the video won't, and so now you're going to be having to aggregate if you do care about downloads as a metric, which many people still do, and probably rightfully so. You are now having to aggregate from your RSS feed, so folks who have downloaded the audio on Apple or Spotify or Amazon or iHeart or wherever, the views on YouTube and the views on Spotify, because the video downloads are on a different technology, and they do not count as RSS downloads. If you have a host, such as Simplecast, Art 19, Libsyn, whomever, your downloads from that video are not going to count on the number your host showing you, so now, particularly if you're running a podcast for a business and you have a boss that has KPIs and wants you to answer, you know, metrics for the podcast. Well, okay, well, give me a minute, boss, because I got to go over here to YouTube, and then I go over here to Spotify, and then go here to my podcast host, and it's very, very cumbersome, so to me it's just not worth it to put your video on Spotify, unless downloads are not a consideration for you, and you just want the exposure, you're not worried about actually metrics and tracking it.

Matt Cundill  9:33  
This podcast, by the way, is not on video in Spotify, it is on video in Apple, and we have not yet seen how we're going to be counted as the podcast super friends. So, let's say somebody gets this far into the show and they're listening on audio. If all of a sudden they want to choose to flip over to the video side, I'm not sure how that's going to be counted in the back end of Apple just yet. I don't think they've introduced the metrics. I haven't been able to go in and do a deep dive on this, but. So far there's no video metrics back there.

Jon Gay  10:03  
Interesting,

Catherine O'Brien  10:04  
I would, I would also say, Jag. Now I'm going to give you back 11 counterpoint. Is that from at least marketing professionals that I've seen, they love to talk about across multiple platforms, so there is sort of a an appetite with certain marketing campaigns that they want to know, like what are we doing video here, what are we doing video here, what are we, they, they love that sort of breakdown, plus the the overall aggregated picture, people love to plump up their their presence by saying, oh, across platforms we've got this kind of presence, this is how many followers across platforms, so I think you know the unsatisfying answer is really it depends on I think that it depends on what people are looking for, how they are measuring things. Again, I'm not, I'm not saying it's not important, I just, I cannot get excited that that this is seems to be a persistent problem that I laugh. Well, your

Jon Gay  11:04  
point about across platforms, Catherine.

Catherine O'Brien  11:06  
Yes,

Jon Gay  11:06  
what's interesting about that is, you know, you're talking about, say, a celebrity with a social media following, and they're doing goodbye, and they're saying, okay, well, I've got 7.4 million followers on Twitter, and I've got 10 point 6 million on Instagram, etc. There's a lot of overlap there, and Matt, correct me if I'm wrong here, but on the research, sometimes folks will consume a show on Spotify, sometimes they'll consume it on YouTube, so while it's, yeah, it's great because you can sell the sizzle and say we have add all those numbers together and say we have this many followers across this many platforms, a lot of them can be redundant, number

Matt Cundill  11:43  
downloads often are. I think that's why you have to go to the unique listeners, which will filter out the IPs, and you can probably get a better idea about the size of your audience in a particular month or for a particular episode. Further to that, Jag, going to be asking questions about, is this worth the money, and we'll start with Spotify for podcasters, and the price on that is free, but is it worth it at free?

Jon Gay  12:08  
You get what you pay for, and I, and the, and that was the other piece of my podcast, is we have seen outages on Spotify in the last 612, 18 months, so if you are hosting on Spotify, that's great, that it's free, and maybe you're a hobby podcaster, maybe you don't have the it in your budget to spend $15 a month on top of your Disney Plus and Netflix and Hulu subscriptions, and that's fine, but if you are going to invest money into this as a project, if you are hosting on Spotify and Spotify has an outage, guess what, nobody's getting your content, because that's where it lives. You're not going to get it from Apple, you're not going to get it from Spotify, you're not going to get it from Amazon, you're not going to get it from iHeart, or you know, random podcast application XYZ. If it lives on Spotify and Spotify goes down, you are SOL. Use an independent podcast host, and one of the platforms goes down, you can actually consume it, or your audience get your content somewhere else.

Matt Cundill  13:08  
Okay. Catherine, oh gosh, yes. Did you switch out the mic?

Catherine O'Brien  13:13  
No, I did not. I dealt with another situation. Never mind, switch

Jon Gay  13:19  
out the mic. It's picking you up out of your laptop,

Matt Cundill  13:21  
yeah, we're catching your laptop right now. That's fine, that's what editing is for, right? And

Jon Gay  13:26  
that's what we do on a regular basis for our clients,

Matt Cundill  13:28  
and we're always editing stuff up, right? Okay, thanks a lot for that, Jack. So, I want to talk a little bit about today, or some of the tools we might use here to decide if they are worth the money. Now, we make payments every year, and I make the joke every week that I buy five tools and I use 20% of each, and I'm still paying for just about everything, but decisions need to be made. First thing, I think we realize the price is going up all over the place on a number of tools, so if you have used this tool, please talk about any of the price increases that you've encountered over the last little while. Jag called me out when I said I was going to try this tool out here in particular, and he said, Why didn't you just go and get Riverside? And I've just been holding off on getting Riverside for, like, I work with Riverside with my clients, but, and I know Riverside is, is, you know, rather durable, but when it comes to live, I really wanted something that sort of specializes in that. So, Jag Riverside overall, whether you have a network version or an individual version, is it worth the money, and what's it cost? What are you paying?

Jon Gay  14:33  
Yes, I am paying $30 a month for it. I think I pay, I get a break because I pay annually, and I am really impressed with Reside, and I don't just say that because Kendall is a previous guest of this podcast, but friend

Matt Cundill  14:46  
of the show,

Jon Gay  14:47  
friend of the show. Thank you. They are rolling out more and more and more content. I really got frustrated with Squad Cast and their tradition, their transition rather to Descript. I didn't even bother to try to. Script rooms after hearing mixed reviews on it, so I put all my new clients, started them on Riverside, and with one or two exceptions, I've moved all of my Squad Cast clients over to Riverside. It is a more reliable recording platform, less prone to error, and they have added so many features. They're now offering hosting, which, full disclosure, I have not tried. None of my clients have tried that. They are offering video integration to Apple. I believe that's still being rolled out. They are constantly replying to folks in their Facebook group with feature requests, and as we dubbed it in our episode with Kendall Coco, their co-creator tool. I've been playing with that this week, and it's pretty good. It's, I said, write me a blog post based on this podcast. It was my three minute podcast I posted today, and it wrote me a blog post for my website. Only required some light editing. Wow, gave me some, you know, some YouTube titles, some podcast titles. Can generate artwork for the podcast. It's, it's as close to a one stop shop as I've seen so very, except very excited about Riverside.

Catherine O'Brien  16:03  
Wow, that's great.

Matt Cundill  16:06  
Catherine, you're back!

Catherine O'Brien  16:08  
Yay! I also would put in a vote for Riverside. Absolutely worth it. It's, it's a great platform. I, I have rarely had any kinds of problems at all. I have also used some of the tried to use Coco to do some thumbnails. I think that they probably have some room to go with that, and especially since thumbnails are a specialized tool. I also want to start using.. I want to give it a shot. It's just a.. it's a workflow question of trying some of their edit, edit the episode, you know, do the whole edit of the episode in Riverside, because that could be really, that could be really beneficial, since I'm already a customer, and it's, they've gotten a lot easier with, let's say, less tech-savvy guests signing in and being a part of the show, I'd like some of the improvements that they've made there, so all those things are really good, and I also give a vote for Riverside as being an absolutely worth it.

Matt Cundill  17:07  
So, question, I'm not a user. If I were to get a transcription in there, will it separate the speakers?

Jon Gay  17:12  
Yes,

Matt Cundill  17:14  
really.

Catherine O'Brien  17:15  
Yeah,

Jon Gay  17:16  
if either from a Riverside recording or if you uploaded an MP file or an MP file, for that matter, with two people on it, it'll give you Speaker A, Speaker B, or Speaker One, Speaker Zero, and you can label them.

Matt Cundill  17:27  
So, from your experience, both of you, what is the mis.. what is the thing that happens with Riverside when a recording goes sideways? Is it because I know they happen, I read all the news groups, I have a few clients where stuff goes sideways. So, what is the number one thing that will cause a Riverside recording to go sideways? Because it's always the user, right.

Catherine O'Brien  17:46  
Well, actually, a very apropos of what just happened to me moments ago, it's the what I've had problems with clients before is if there's any interruption to the audio, it defaults to a not the mic that you had selected. So, I've had lots of clients who something goes wrong or they have to come back out, or you know, something something impacts audio, and now the fancy mic is not being picked up, it's being picked up from the laptop or somewhere else, anywhere you don't want it to be picked up, that's that's where it likes to go, and and so then the entire recording is with that that lesser mic or the laptop mic or the phone in your pocket, I mean it's just it's been amazing some of the places that it'll go,

Matt Cundill  18:33  
so that moves me over to Descript or slash Squad Cast. So Squad Cast is something that I am still using to record.

Jon Gay  18:41  
Good luck.

Matt Cundill  18:42  
Well, tell me why

Jon Gay  18:44  
I have had issues where the odd, the files are out of sync. I had one client in particular where I had to manually move every time there was a transition between her and her guest, because Squad Cast, the videos were just not lined up well. I have had issues where there have been frames missing out of videos on Squad Cast with a couple of clients. I do like Descripts Editor. I think Descripts Editor is better than Riverside, so I still keep it both. I still keep both subscriptions, but that's what I.. because this is my full-time job. If I were a part-time podcaster. If I had to pick, I'd pick Riverside.

Catherine O'Brien  19:23  
Yeah, and can I give one more vote for just for Riverside? That's something that I noticed that's going on. And again, shout out to prior Super Friends guest, Kendall. They are doing community webinars and other sort of interviews that seem to be very much getting the podcaster life, so for example, one of their most recent webinars was about getting people to live events based on podcast appearances, and I thought, oh, they, they understand something about what podcasters, even smaller podcasters, are doing, is that they are doing a podcast. Us to cultivate an audience to get the audience to do something like go to a live event, like go to a conference, like go to a workshop, and I saw, I thought, okay, that is smart, that is providing the kinds of information to podcasters, meeting the podcasters where they're at, this is what we're trying to do with our show, this is what, how we're trying to connect with people, so it made me really think, like, okay, Riverside is paying attention to what the podcaster needs and is giving them the resources

Matt Cundill  20:28  
to do it. Jag, question for you about rooms.

Jon Gay  20:32  
Okay?

Matt Cundill  20:33  
Have you had any rooms, by the way, is from Descript? Have you tell me about your experience and your limited experience in using it so far, and why you just said I gotta move on

Jon Gay  20:42  
zero, I'm gonna, I'll be completely transparent here. I haven't tried it. I have had, I saw some stuff online of people saying they loved it, some people just saying they were hating it, and just on my general frustration with Squad Cast, I decided, you know what, Riverside is a better product, I know it, I think it's more user friendly to somebody, maybe on the beginner side, on the text, on the tech piece of things, and I just didn't even bother to try it.

Matt Cundill  21:06  
Wow. Okay, because I'm using Squad Cast, and it's kind of like your favorite pen. This is my favorite pen that I have here right now. I always love my favorite pen, and let's say my favorite pen were to disappear, I would go and get another pen, but the company would say, oh no, we've made this new pen that you might like to try and say no, I try this other pen instead. I'll also get

Jon Gay  21:25  
off your lawn while you're at it,

Matt Cundill  21:28  
but you know what, because Catherine was just talking about webinars and the great job that Riverside does with it, but you know this script, I felt like they were trying to sort of get everybody jump started into rooms because we're here and rooms is out, and you know, of course, it doesn't work anything like, you know, Squad Cast used to, so I kind of feel like they're trying to get everybody on board to use it, and I've used it a couple times, but I'm not excited enough to go and use it on a regular basis at this point, so with that said, obviously we can't recommend Squad Cast because it's being phased out, but now we're looking at the script. Let's just take the rooms portion out of it. Is it recommendable, and is it worth the money?

Jon Gay  22:11  
Catherine

Matt Cundill  22:12  
Jag, Katherine Matt.

Catherine O'Brien  22:15  
Well, I will say, and maybe this is a sub-issue, maybe this is a therapeutic issue that we can deal with in just a moment. Is I am, I'm grateful for Descript and the ease of the text audio edit your audio like a Word document. I think that has been tremendous. I do see that they are making, and I'm a paid, I'm a paid customer also to Descript, I have seen how much better they've gotten with some of these one click solutions, like removing all the filler words, like removing retakes, removing errors, all of those things are getting better. One of the tools I really like in Descript right now is the regenerate, so if somebody flubs a word or it just gets garbled in the recording, it can regenerate a single word without big complicated permissions, and it just, through AI, can make it sound pristine, and that is awesome. So I do see that they're moving on all of these things, but as I just mentioned a minute ago, I have a fondness for Riverside. I can't break into.. I, this is a problem. This is my.. this is the therapy session portion of this response. Is that I do.. I know I have a problem with once I get a workflow going. It's.. it is difficult for me to break routine and try something new. I want to try the Riverside, just to see, to test, like you were saying, Jag, the test, the full edit, because right now I'm recording raw in Riverside, bringing it over to Descript using Descript for those, the ease of the one clicks that it does so well, but but if there was one of them that did the whole enchilada, then I might just, I might go for one tool. Yeah,

Jon Gay  24:05  
I have tried the regenerate tool in Riverside once or twice, and it worked, and I found it worked well. Yeah, so again, you know, somebody or somebody garbles a word to your point, Catherine, or if somebody says three, but they meant to say two, you know what, and you can't get the guest back to re-record it, and it's an important piece of information, something like that, so I do like it. I just, I feel that the editor for pulling out ums and ahs and other false starts is a little bit smoother and descript, but Riverside is improving.

Catherine O'Brien  24:32  
Yeah,

Jon Gay  24:33  
I like having, and I like having the versatility both, and honestly, if you get somebody who recorded on a laptop microphone or not in less than ideal conditions, a lot of times, what I'll do is I'll run it through Riverside's Magic Audio, I'll run it through Descript Studio Sound, I'll run it if it's particularly bad audio, and I'll run it through Adobe Enhanced, not all, I mean, not all together, but separately, and figure out, you know, which one for that particular piece of bad audio was. The best fit that I can live with.

Catherine O'Brien  25:02  
Yeah, three layers of magic. There you've got, you've got three different, different kettles that you can work with. There, I

Matt Cundill  25:10  
think that's my point. There's a great example of just using a little bit of each one of these tools in order for it to be, you know, worthwhile. We get used to it because we, you know, get used to it using Descript. We like to edit it using the words we like, you know, we like the certain, like studio sound, for instance, sounds like it's doing a good job in Descript, but at the end of the day, is, you know, if somebody can't afford each one of these tools, you have to make some choices, right?

Catherine O'Brien  25:40  
Yeah, exactly. Now, the one thing that I should was just had a nightmare reminder about is there is a, there is a cost to having just one. If Riverside was down, if Squad Cast was down, if one of these things was not working, then you are stuck, because you don't have, if you're, you've got all your eggs in one particular way of doing it, we'll all end up on Zoom, like we need David Yazz here to understand that, Joe's, we'll all end up back on Zoom, or some other way to be video recording.

Matt Cundill  26:13  
Yeah, I had a client actually today recording a podcast, and they said there's some skips and blips at around minute 36 and you know, he, he just thinks it's between the two of them that they were recording it, but they didn't register on the recording, because, of course, the local recordings that get uploaded, in this case, to Squad Cast. This has also come up, I think, one time before, and that is AI credits inside Descript. Now, I, this is another

Jon Gay  26:40  
thing that Dave is probably our resident expert on. It's a shame he's not here today. Yeah, are you grandfathered

Matt Cundill  26:46  
in on the old pricing system, Jag? Or

Jon Gay  26:49  
no? They eventually, I think, phase.. I was grandfathered in for quite some time, and I think they eventually moved me over to a transition to a different plan.

Catherine O'Brien  26:56  
Same.

Matt Cundill  26:57  
Okay, I'll just speak to Stream Yard for sex, Stream Yard decided that they would raise everyone's prices to a point of about what originally started for me at 300 a year became 350-370-5394 10 444 last year. Then they wanted to rate, and the rate, by the way, if you signed up today, is 44 bucks a month, that works out to 800 US dollars a year, and because they decided, oh, you work for a particular company, your new bill is going to be $4,000 Good

Jon Gay  27:28  
Lord,

Matt Cundill  27:29  
yeah. And so I was like, no, and goodbye very, very fast. Wow. Now, if you, if you are a company, that's the rate you pay, it's probably about 3000 but I had some extra seats involved, but for individual users it's, it's, you know, I think the core plan is about 44 $48 a month, maybe a little bit more now, but still I thought, as a tool, it was very, it's worthwhile if it's the only one you use, yeah, and you're not paying for too much else, you can do things. I'm, as we're by the way, going through this, I'm playing around with, with this, this new tool called One Stream. You can find it at One Street dot live. It'll take a little time, I think, you know, to configure everything up to make sure that it looks kind of the same as what Stream Yard, what I could do with Stream Yard. There are a few limitations. Right now, is it worth the money? Well, we'll see. I think one year of this particular product, I think, comes in at about four, about 300 plus dollars US. There's about 400 yeah, three or $400 US for a pro plan. But again, jury's still out. We'll do a few episodes on this of the podcast, Super Friends, here. And then we'll make a make a decision here on on where to do and where to go next with it. So far, so good. Hopefully it's stuck. Hopefully the streaming is actually streaming. Yeah, we'll find out.

Catherine O'Brien  28:53  
We'll find out

Matt Cundill  28:55  
other tools that we use. Does anybody use Headliner?

Jon Gay  29:00  
I still use it for one or two clients. Actually, I have a couple different use cases for it. One is I have a client that records video, but still produces an audio podcast. I use the video for the reel, and then for the audio podcast, I, I make a video for YouTube. I mean, I could just use the RSS feed, but I like having a custom thumbnail for each one, so I'll use her audio, make an MP file out of it for Youtube, so that's one use case. The other use case is I have, I have a Chat GPT, I used to write my show notes off a transcript, I have one client that doesn't need exact transcripts, so I've used headliners transcription feature just for a rough transcript, enough that I can write show notes off of, I think it's called

Matt Cundill  29:51  
Eddie, right?

Jon Gay  29:52  
Yes, Eddie, Edy, yep, but now that I think about it, I'm recording in Riverside, I can just take the transcript from Riverside now, so I probably. Don't even need that step.

Catherine O'Brien  30:02  
I never made the plunge to paying for Headliner for anything, and now I use I use either Riverside or Descript for everything I used them previously for.

Matt Cundill  30:13  
So I like it still, but not for the same reasons about why I started using it. I still like the fact it makes nice audiograms. They are taking some steps to get into a little bit of video, but I love how I can create those manual YouTube videos for audio only podcasts, and with the direct upload to the YouTube page is quite handy. It's.. I've had it.. do you know, I think for a summer it did 200 episodes of a particular podcast I was doing it. It took probably about six weeks to complete.

Catherine O'Brien  30:44  
I think I've heard of podcasters who are trying to get back catalogs onto YouTube using it for this big giant batch of creating episodes.

Matt Cundill  30:52  
Yeah, I think I think that's probably its best feature right now. One of the things I wanted to talk about was was AI, and who's paying for that? Is anybody.. it's too bad Johnny's not here, because I know when we talk to Johnny, he's.. he's all into Claude,

Jon Gay  31:10  
that young whippersnapper.

Matt Cundill  31:12  
We're going to talk about things we have no idea what we're talking about here, but does anybody use pay for an AI tool?

Jon Gay  31:21  
Catherine,

Catherine O'Brien  31:22  
oh well. well, I guess sort of indirectly, because I do. I pay for Twitter, and so I have Grok, but I think I think Grok is available to anybody, even if you don't have a check mark. But I use Grok a lot, and I like Grok a lot. I used to, I do sometimes still use Claude for creative writing kinds of things, or but I use I primarily the AI tool I go to the most is Grok. I like it.

Matt Cundill  31:48  
How much is the Twitter or the X subscription?

Catherine O'Brien  31:52  
$80 a year, something like that,

Matt Cundill  31:54  
which makes sense. 105 Canadian. Okay, yeah,

Jon Gay  31:58  
I subscribe to Chat GPT. It's 20 bucks a month for the plan that allows me to create GPTs. I actually, full disclosure, I'm starting. I've been working my way through this course of.io course that I kept seeing ads for in my social feeds. It's a basically a one stop shop that it's a, it's a course in every one of the main AI products. So I did the course on Mid Journey, which is graphic design. I did the course on Claude. I did the course on Chat GPT, and Claude does seem like a better version of Chat GPT. That said, that you know, I'm still, I'm still in Chat GPT, and I'm still trying to learn how to maximize it to my best use.

Matt Cundill  32:37  
What's a GPT?

Jon Gay  32:38  
A GPT. Oh, fair question. A GPT is a custom set of instructions that is a repeatable action. So, I have a GPT that I've downloaded and found on the web that I customized to my ability. So, when I get my podcast transcript, I upload it to my GPT. The GPT then writes the show notes in my voice. It gives me timestamps for YouTube and Spotify and Apple chapters. It gives me suggestions on clips for social media, and it gives me what's the other thing, gives me one other thing, I think, as well. Oh, keywords. So, so that's kind of one stop shop for me, and it's not just set it and forget it. I go in and I manually will tweak things, but it's a great starting point to summarize, write the show notes, and take care of all that.

Matt Cundill  33:27  
I'm a paying customer as well of Chat GPT, and I couldn't tell you exactly what a GPT was exactly, but by

Jon Gay  33:35  
paying you have access to GPT. The free version does not.

Matt Cundill  33:38  
Yeah, actually, and so I did actually start this process using Spotify spreadsheets, so Spotify will send me just a whole bunch of spreadsheets, and I can take a whole year's worth of those spreadsheets, put them in, and then ask for a bunch of things from it, and get the breakdowns, which, by the way, is how I did come up with that we're getting 20% less downloads, you know, over the years. YouTube video, and yeah, it's great. You can ask it to do a few things. I know I'm listen, I'm not big on AI, but that job used to take me four hours, five hours in a day, and it took a minute to give me the answer. So I don't know what to say, except yay, we have microphones in front of us, and Jag, before we started today, you asked me if this microphone was worth it. Not really, you actually said, "Do you like it? So this is an SM, it's a short SM seven dB, and it gives you a little bit more gas that I don't need to go get a cloud lifter,

Jon Gay  34:44  
okay?

Matt Cundill  34:45  
So, is it worth it? Well, it's the same price if I went and got the cloud lifter in order to level it out and make, you know, to bring it up to the right, right level. So, yes, I guess it's worth it. It saves me a little space here on the desk,

Jon Gay  34:58  
so mine is plugged into. A Rodecaster Duo Mini, which essentially gives it the boost that the Cloudlifter would need. So, you guys tell me how I sound, but I think in my old school SM 7b I don't think I need to upgrade from there. You sound great.

Catherine O'Brien  35:12  
Sounds of Jag Podcast Productions,

Matt Cundill  35:17  
and also I had this on the list today, and that's the Rode Pod Mike. Is that what you're using, Catherine?

Catherine O'Brien  35:22  
Yes, it sure is. I recommend it's $99 now. It is my.. the only problem is that it is USB only, so you do have to think about a Focusrite, the Scarlet, or something like that. But I.. this is now my go-to for recommending for people who are just getting into it. You can get a great sounding mic without a real hit to your pocketbook.

Matt Cundill  35:45  
Um, Jack, do you know the price of the SM 7b I

Jon Gay  35:48  
think it's 400 and the DB is 500 American, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  35:52  
I don't want to quote everything in Canadian money, it just makes everything sound so expensive.

Catherine O'Brien  35:59  
Plus, its nickname is the Looney, right? So 500 loonies, 500 loonies. All

Matt Cundill  36:06  
right, so just a few audio tools. Level later was one that came up the other day when we were having some, some discussions offline. Tell me about it, and how much, and do I want it?

Jon Gay  36:20  
It's free, it's free, so it's worth it if you have audio where the level is all over the place. It's a nice way to even out your levels. I'm trying to figure out how to do it in the newer version of Isotope RX, which is a really high-end editing platform, but I think I think that Level Iter does pretty well. The only thing is, it, it sometimes will boost the breaths, but not always. I'm not sure what your experience is with the Catherine.

Catherine O'Brien  36:46  
Yeah, no, I have not had that problem. I really, it's a great tool, and in fact, if I can, you know, I like to get a little philosophical here. Let me allow me to share a story. This is a good growth mindset story for the podcaster, and it involves the level later. So, originally, Levelator was just available for Apple, and I do not use Apple. I have a.. I use Windows for my

Jon Gay  37:11  
Apple as well.

Catherine O'Brien  37:11  
I, yeah, see, I.. all my grudges are coming up today on this show. Everybody's gonna learn all the grudges that I keep. This is terrible. Anyway, so there was no.. there was only Levelator for Apple, and I just fixed it in my.. everybody was said it was just such a great tool, and I fixed it in my mind. Okay, that's that is not a tool that is available to me. We'll just go and figure out other things until many years later when Jag said to me, 'No, they've Levelator has a Windows version, and I was like, you're kidding me. So now I am happily using the level later on my system, and I just realized that I did get fixed. People add services, people add different features, they go and use, they make them their products for different kinds of operating systems, and so even if I, even if there's something that is not available right now for Android or Windows or Apple, or whoever, is, you know, keep it on the keep, you got to keep fresh on what is going out there, what the company is doing, what the products are. Well, who's doing the best job, because they do change all the time. So it is important to stay up on what the companies are putting out, because you don't want to be caught in version creep or version decay, where you're using old versions of things when newer features would be better for what you're, you can't keep

Jon Gay  38:31  
track, ask

Catherine O'Brien  38:33  
us.

Jon Gay  38:34  
Bye. I know to your point about Streamyard price skyrocketing mad. I was very frustrated, so I live in the Adobe ecosystem, I edit my audio and Adobe Audition, I added my video and Adobe Premiere. I basically, it's.. I could not.. my business would not survive without Adobe. Adobe is now the subscription model. I know we all know some radio and production people who have, like, an older standalone version with very few bells and whistles, because they don't want to pay the subscription. Well, for the full suite of Adobe products, they went from 675 to 825 for the year, and I thought that was a pretty steep price increase, but they've got me by the, you know, what's, and I can't do anything about it. Well, as it would turn out, they upgraded from the latest version update to Premiere, and it was bogging down my whole computer. I'm thinking, okay, maybe I've got too many other things running in the background. So I closed everything else, and it was still slow to the point where I couldn't click through the menus. So I got my IT guy on the phone, who knows everything, and he looked at it, and he said, this is odd. And he went on a couple forums and found the latest version of Premiere is so buggy that on some systems you can't use it, so the solution was retroactively go back to the prior version of Premiere, and now it purrs. So, thanks Adobe for charging me $150 more per year for an inferior product.

Catherine O'Brien  39:56  
Yeah, well, and just as a consumer. Dollars like this is one of those things that you, we all have to get, we get to the point where it's like, okay, now my internet bill is so high, or now my, our insurance is going up, so that's the thing that forces you to be the consumer advocate for yourself, and just see what's out there, you know, like you're in your example, is go to your IT guy and find out what you have to do to get it to where it is going to work for you, and you know it is easy to sort of get complacent with these things, but we, we, you know, it's better to stay on top of it all.

Matt Cundill  40:32  
Yeah, I thought that too, because again, most of these things are going up in price very, very quickly, and you know, budgeting decisions need to be made. I'm not sure, maybe the discussion. It's good to have the discussion in June as we approach halfway, you know, through the year, but I just see the prices of some of this stuff just going up. I'm like, where do you get off? Yeah, what makes you think? Why do you, you know, especially when you know when they're charging,

Jon Gay  40:57  
they're charging more because their expenses are all getting higher, not because they're offering a better product, a better

Catherine O'Brien  41:01  
product, exactly. Yeah, well,

Matt Cundill  41:03  
maybe you don't need to add so much AI. Maybe you can give us an option that doesn't involve AI, and I know I cite Microsoft, by the way, for that, because they, and I asked, I said, "Can I get a version without Copilot? And they said, "Yes, we will. We will accommodate. Wow, yeah, because I was loud and obnoxious about it,

Catherine O'Brien  41:22  
not you. You were kind and polite about it. I'm sure I

Matt Cundill  41:25  
don't need, I don't need four or five different ways to use AI.

Jon Gay  41:29  
Yeah,

Matt Cundill  41:30  
you know, Copilot was going to be another way to do it. I completely forgot, Catherine, I mean, I pay for X, which means I get Grok. I don't even use Grok, and I'm paying for it, and maybe I should.

Catherine O'Brien  41:43  
I'm going to tell Grok to look out for you, and they bring Grok something for you to do.

Matt Cundill  41:47  
Well, should I mean, because I downloaded Cloud, so I use Chat GPT and pay for it. I downloaded Claude Cloud the other day, and should I be, you know, but should I be paying attention to Grok?

Catherine O'Brien  41:59  
I would say yes, I think it's a great for the for the things I've asked it to do, troubleshooting, it's excellent. I love saying step by step, brief answer, bullet point, and just I can, it keeps a history, so even though it's not a technical GPT, like you were mentioning, Jag, I can go back, so I can have a running thread and bring it, you know, bring something new to that old topic, and it'll conform to the, you know, I don't have to re-explain the whole thing again.

Matt Cundill  42:29  
I've had some times when I'm on X, and I'll say at Grok, is this BS that this person is saying true? Yes, it's completely true. Now I'm embarrassed. How do I delete this, and get,

Jon Gay  42:45  
but a lot of these AI tools are certainly not foolproof. For example, the GP I mentioned this - I don't know if I mentioned this publicly or in our private monthly chat - but the GPT I was using for timestamps got lazy on me and started rounding the timestamps off, instead of giving exact timestamps, it started giving me rounding it off to 30 seconds, and I had to keep telling it. Finally, I had to go into the GPT and the instructor, manual instructions, and say give me exact timestamps to the second. I had Matt, you'll appreciate this. I had a radio friend who was moving markets, and he couldn't tell me where he was going because of some HR issues with where he was going, and I asked based on what I knew about where he was going. I gave Chat GPT the information. I said, Can you narrow down which city he might be going to? And it didn't - it didn't include the city I thought he was going to, and I said City X, and he said, and it said, Oh, you're right, my mistake, I should have included that one. Okay,

Catherine O'Brien  43:48  
thanks.

Matt Cundill  43:50  
Maybe, maybe this, these things are just too human. Oh, yeah, you're right, I just didn't feel like getting to that part.

Jon Gay  43:58  
Yeah,

Matt Cundill  43:58  
yeah, Jag, you talked about Adobe. Can I use the Adobe podcast enhancement feature without a full subscription?

Jon Gay  44:08  
That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. You need to have a login for Adobe. I don't know what level of subscription you would need to be able to access that suite of tools.

Matt Cundill  44:18  
Okay,

Catherine O'Brien  44:19  
I bet we can guess with Adobe, the answer is going to be no, but let's see. Hey, go ask Rock if you can.

Matt Cundill  44:28  
And does anybody here use Izotope? All right, so Jag, I have not upgraded this in years. Is it worth the money for the tools that are in there

Jon Gay  44:40  
for me so far, yes. My, and again, I, it's like when I go with the craps table, I know about 20% of the board, I, and I stick in my comfort zone. That said, I personally, through my taste, have found the deep breath tool in their new RX 12 to be the best one. I've used so far, I have found it to work very well, and you can set it to natural, so it's not any sudden drops. I just finished editing an hour-long video podcast today, and to be able to run the file through Izotope in 10 or 15 minutes, as opposed to having to stop every time I get a breath in Adobe and cut it out, is worth it to me. Their mouth deep click has improved. All of the the existing modules have improved. Now, again, to your point about AI, Matt, there's a whole bunch of, oh, well, we'll use AI, and we'll analyze your video or in your audio, and we'll, we'll give you a suggestion of of a chain module chain of which tools to use in which order and which intensity, and blah blah blah blah blah. I don't need all that. I don't need to analyze my audio and give me eight suggestions in order. I've got my standard tools that I use, which are largely De Plosive and Mouth De Click, and now Deep Breath. Occasionally, I'll use their Dialog Isolate feature, which is fantastic. And then they're virtuals, I don't know, because I haven't used them yet, but everything I've used has been worth it. And what I like about Adobe, if you're not paying the monthly fee, which I'm not, if you have, once you buy their advanced package and they come out with the next level advanced every, I don't know, 18 months or whatever it is, instead of paying $3,000 for the package, they'd say, well, we'll cross upgrade you for a few 100, and they get me every time, I haven't regretted any upgrade yet, and they're up to 12. I'm not sure what your version you're using that.

Matt Cundill  46:25  
Oh, I'm way back there, like eight

Jon Gay  46:27  
eight. Okay, yeah.

Matt Cundill  46:29  
Should I make the jump

Jon Gay  46:30  
if you, if you can get a deal for a crossover deal, or wait for Black Friday, or wait till they offer a deal, but but I'm very happy with the newest version.

Matt Cundill  46:40  
They do have sales that pop up that are quite enticing. They do 29 bucks sometimes for the

Jon Gay  46:47  
basic package, which, if you're starting out, great tool for that at that price point.

Matt Cundill  46:51  
Adobe Podcast Enhanced can go for 999 a month.

Jon Gay  46:55  
Okay,

Matt Cundill  46:56  
so there is a.. Is there a limit

Jon Gay  46:58  
on content

Matt Cundill  46:59  
that apart, I don't know. I know it's free for the, for a half hour, but I think it, it widens it quite a bit. And $99 for the year,

Jon Gay  47:09  
they have just, they have just up, upgraded the maximums on this, because there, there are some video files of mine that were too large to use in Adobe Hints, and it accepts them now, so wave MP, MP for AAC, FLAC, and OGG for audio, MP for MOV, and m4 V for video, and I'm not sure the size limit, but it might, it might be two gigs when you have the full subscription at this point. They also have a convert to video button, which I have not played with yet, but I find it interesting.

Matt Cundill  47:42  
What have I missed?

Jon Gay  47:45  
What to pay for every month? Disability insurance,

Matt Cundill  47:50  
that's worth it.

Jon Gay  47:51  
Yes,

Matt Cundill  47:51  
yeah. Is there something? Is there a tool that either of you use that is so amazing you need to share it with everybody today, because it's so worth the money.

Jon Gay  48:02  
I'm putting my spreadsheets. Actually, look now. Let's see, Catherine, you got anything?

Catherine O'Brien  48:07  
Yeah, but this is a not to beat a dead horse. This is one I've mentioned before, but I, it is helpful for me if there are tools. The, the top layer of this is, there are tools for something for an area where you feel weak, so I feel weak with headlines. I love the Co Schedule headline tool. It has been a confidence booster for me, and it just gives me, as you know, a tool to create hook enticing headlines, because that is something I didn't feel good about. I also, I also thought I also didn't feel comfortable making things too clickbaity. I had no sort of moderation there. It either was dull or it was like hyperbolic and not kind of the product that my professional clients really wanted. So I pay for co-scheduling at the headliner tool, headline headline analyzer. I actually think it's helped me become a better headline title episode writer. You can toggle between audio podcast and YouTube to have it pick and help you write a better title for each of those different platforms, and that title is important. It is part of the clickability of your episode, so it's $100 a year for me, it's worth it, because that's an area where I feel weak. I love being able to run things through the analyzer and just getting a read on on on how it is, and in fact, well, you and I, not to, not to be too intriguing, but you know, we have seen some new tools that suggest headlines, and I picked some of those suggested headlines and ran it through the analyzer, and they were good. They had good SEO, they had good headline qualities, they were pithy, they were, you know, they had just the right amount of getting the information across by, but also making it something that somebody wanted to, you know, take the next. Level with, and listen to, so yeah, that's that's a tool that I like a lot. Did you find those improved

Jon Gay  50:05  
headlines really helped your numbers, Catherine?

Catherine O'Brien  50:08  
I, you know, I don't.. it's not like, oh, I started using this tool and everything went through the roof or anything like that, but it.. it definitely.. well, I think it's more for me. I'll just speak for myself. It's more of a confidence, but none of my, my clients rarely reject the client that headlines that I make using this tool. Does that, is that helpful at all? I can't really point and say, oh, this has had a direct impact, but to me it's like a confidence builder for like we're putting out the episode in the best way possible for the audience, it's conveying the meaning, it's also making it enticing as well. I think that's for me, it's worth it.

Jon Gay  50:49  
The only other tools I'll mention, Matt, aren't specific to podcasting, but I have a password app, which is, you know, 100 bucks a year, and we have logins to so many of these different platforms. I think having a password app is well worth it, as well as file storage. I've got both Dropbox and Google Drive, especially if you're going to be getting into video podcasting, where it's almost table stakes to be 1080 resolution. Those files are big. An hour long 1080 file is six gigabytes. You want to be, you want to be cramming up hard drives, storing all that stuff.

Matt Cundill  51:21  
Yes, actually, I've been using Dropbox for many, many years now, and I'm quite happy with it. And to that point, and I, you know, it was Kendall, friend of the show from Riverside, she was on my show, The Sound Off Podcast, and we, we started talking a lot about, about file movement, and just that's that's a new expense over the last, you know, five or six years, because as you know, we get into video now, you have to move a six gig file, and that's a lot, and it's hard to move it around, it's hard, especially if you have a client who's in a rural place and rural

Jon Gay  51:59  
country.

Matt Cundill  52:00  
Oh

Catherine O'Brien  52:00  
yeah,

Matt Cundill  52:01  
absolutely, I worth it? Starlink. Yes, I'm going to be bringing that with me to my summer home. I don't know what that price is. I think it's, but it's going to be worth it, or else the company doesn't operate, so whatever that price is, it's.. we're paying it.

Catherine O'Brien  52:19  
Well, I have to say, when you were jag, when you were talking, I thought to myself, you know, I, this is this is one of those things about getting to a certain age, paying for reduction of hassle is huge. My threshold for what I'm willing to reduce hassle has gotten much higher, so I, or lower, I guess I am willing to pay if it actually removes hassle, so if you can pay for Starlink, and it, yes, it's more than what you would pay for your fiber, or whatever, like that, but you know it's going to absolutely be reliable, it's going to have the upload download times that you need, that it becomes worth it. I mean, that's your, in some ways, you're starting to buy back your time and your, your stress level, although all of those things can be worth it.

Jon Gay  53:06  
My wife calls that time value of money, as an example. We moved last December, and we tried to paint two bedrooms. It did not go well. I painted, she tried to fix what I painted. We ended up hiring somebody to paint the two rooms, and it was money very, very well spent. Much like if you hire us to produce or edit your podcast, and to get all those hours back in your day, that for you is money well spent.

Catherine O'Brien  53:30  
Wow, mic drop.

Matt Cundill  53:33  
I think we should just leave it there. Yeah,

Catherine O'Brien  53:34  
that's a good way to end it.

Matt Cundill  53:36  
Yeah, you can go to the web page, by the way, over at Soft dot network. Podcast Super Friends is up there. All the contact information on where you can find us is on the website, by the way. And all information about the products we talked about are going to be in the show notes, and I'll try to put prices in there as well.

Jon Gay  53:56  
In US dollars,

Matt Cundill  53:57  
in US dollars, of course, Canadians can figure it. I think they've learned to multiply by 1.36 on just about everything,

Catherine O'Brien  54:04  
and we'll lock down a discount code for one stream if we can remember to say their name properly.

Matt Cundill  54:10  
I will put - actually, I will put one in in there as well, because I do have - I do have a code if you want to give this, give this a whirl as well. So, round clock, round we go, and we'll say goodbye,

Jon Gay  54:24  
goodbye everybody. Thank you for joining us here with the podcast Super Friends. My name is Catherine O'Brien, signing off from Baton Rouge. John Gay, Jag Podcast Productions at Jag Podcast productions.com Lovely Berkeley, Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Matt Cundill  54:37  
I'm Matt Cundill, somewhere in Canada, just just trying to figure out all the conversions.