Why Is Remote Recording Software So Unreliable?

After a flawless escape room victory, we're tackling a puzzle we can't solve: why remote podcast recording software still fails so often. From audio glitches to browser limitations, these are our frustrations of creating studio-quality content online. 

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

So you guys did an escape room last night.

Jordan: 0:02

Yes.

Alban: 0:03

Yeah, we did an escape room. We may or may not have set a record, I think we did. Or the people at the escape room were buttering us up, trying to get us to do a second escape room.

Kevin: 0:12

I think they always tell people they set a record.

Jordan: 0:15

It was a little bit of a tall tale.

Alban: 0:17

I like to think we set a record, but I doubt it.

Jordan: 0:21

Yeah, this kid. He was like we need like 40 clues and only like a couple people have ever finished the room. And then we were in it and we completed it with like 20 minutes left, no clues used, and it was like there's no way, there's no way.

Alban: 0:36

Well, I choose to believe. My truth is only 20,. This is what they told us only 20% of people complete the room and the average person gets a bunch of clues and they still don't even finish. And we walked out with 21 minutes to go, no clues, and we were riding high and they said you did such a great job. And also one of the things we'd like to offer you is, since you've already done one room, you can get a second room for 40% off. What a great deal. Everyone in that room signed up again.

Jordan: 1:05

We were in.

Kevin: 1:06

We're like well, we've already set one record, we might as well set two. Was it just the three of you, or were you put together with another group?

Alban: 1:14

Well, I brought one of my dear friends, John Pollard. Okay, so he came. John is on the software side at Buzzsprout.

Jordan: 1:20

Yeah.

Alban: 1:21

And then we had two randoms, and the two randoms were great. They immediately went. We're going right back in another room and we're doing it on our own Right. Swipe that card, we're back. Yeah, we're back.

Jordan: 1:33

Yeah, it was funny because we went out to dinner and then we came back to do a room and they came out and they were like we did not complete that second room. We had so many clues and we never completed it and it's, it's way too hard, it's way too hard. And we just took that as an indication that like okay, I got his phone number to text him when we finished the room, just like rubbing it a little bit, you know he really did.

Alban: 1:54

He said, let me uh what? Do you guys take my number so you can text me if you guys were able to get out of here? And I'm like and his wife was telling George she's like, pay close attention, attention to detail. We're like I think that's actually like a prerequisite for all these rooms. But we paid attention. We barely got out.

Jordan: 2:11

Barely. We had like 13 minutes left. I sent him like a couple pictures of us in all our glory, having finished the thing, and we're just like yeah.

Kevin: 2:19

I have not done a lot of escape rooms Maybe three, I think, in my life but my theory in my vast experience is that the smaller your group, the more likely you are to complete it quickly and efficiently. I'm with you. I think the more people you have in there, it's just more confusion.

Jordan: 2:35

It's too many cooks in the kitchen, yeah.

Alban: 2:37

And you've also got people who don't share that. They have a clue. So there's one point where like, like trying to get something through in this other room and a guy's walking around with a cane but I don't know this guy, so I think he just has a cane and he's like, you know, we could maybe use this to reach in there. And we're like, is that a prop? He's like, yeah, I found it over there.

Kevin: 2:56

Like, dude, we don't know. You Don't act like you, just need a cane.

Alban: 3:03

So I'm with you. I think that maybe keeping the group smaller is probably a better idea.

Jordan: 3:08

Yeah, so you haven't guessed. I'm in Florida. We're in the studio recording this time.

Alban: 3:13

We are. This is a live in-person podcast recording.

Jordan: 3:16

It's weird.

Kevin: 3:17

Yeah, it's rare for us, but I feel like the work that you guys did in the escape room last night was, you know, solving mysteries is a good setup for what we should talk about today. What's this mystery? Being that we typically record remote, we use remote recording software. Today we don't have to, and last night you solved mysteries. There's another mystery that's plaguing podcasting right now, which has to do with remote recording software. And why is it all so buggy and terrible and expensive?

Alban: 3:47

Wow, I feel like that's a bit much.

Kevin: 3:49

I don't know if it's all terrible buggy, it's maybe a bit much, but I think even the best tools that we've used we've still had problems with. So I don't want to say they're all terrible, but they all have issues once in a while. Right and yeah, and it's pretty expensive software. So when you're paying, you know, $30 a month roughly for the software you shouldn't like run into problems on the regular, especially with things that are like high stakes.

Kevin: 4:16

I think one of the worst businesses to possibly ever be in would be like a wedding photographer. Like you think about the anxiety level of a wedding photographer. I don't know what all you're paying for with a wedding photographer, but I think part of what you're paying for is that they can't mess up. Right, like you have one wedding on one day. It's super expensive. They have to get all the shots, like they've got to get whatever the uh, the bride kissing, the groom and the cake cutting. And if they don't get that shot, like you're not going to reenact it. There's no way to fake it.

Kevin: 4:44

Maybe with AI someday in the future, but where things stand right now, you miss that shot, you're going to have a very unhappy customer, right, right, and that is kind of the same thing with this remote recording software is that you're going to have guests on, they're going to tell their story, they're going to give you an hour of their time or two hours or whatever. If that recording gets messed up, the stakes are high. You don't want to have to redo that. You don't want to have to go back to that guest ever and say, can we record it again? And even if you do, you're going to miss some magical moments that you had the first time.

Jordan: 5:12

Oh yeah.

Alban: 5:13

Somebody. I was at Podcast Movement and she did support for one of the remote recording softwares and she said how do you deal with people who just get really mean or mad in support and I was like man, I don't feel like we have tons of customers who are like over the top angry.

Alban: 5:30

And then I thought about it and went yours is much more high stakes. I was like even if Bruss Brout went totally down for an hour, we'd say, oh my gosh, that was our mistake, huge fault. But all the episodes are live now. The worst thing that happened was listeners didn't get to listen for an hour. But if Squadcast or Riverside or Zoom or any of them go down for a minute and you were in a recording now it's painful. It's a much more high stakes game.

Jordan: 5:57

It really is.

Kevin: 5:58

And I do think there is a lot of complexity in the problem that they're solving. It really is, and I do think there is a lot of complexity in the problem that they're solving. It's more complex than just podcast hosting. Right, you're doing something live. Even if you're not live broadcasting out to the world, you are trying to capture something live, real time. So if there is a technical glitch, then that has just messed up that thing. That's happening in that moment. I get all that. But it seems like all of these companies whether you're well, not all of them, but most of them outside of Zoom, but Adobe Podcasts, riverside Squadcasts, clean Feed, those are the ones that come top of mind they're all solving this problem through browser technology. Right, they're trying to record video and audio and they're utilizing the browser as like the fat client for the software solution, and then they're all piggybacking on the capabilities of the browser to make that happen. They're adding their own special sauce in addition to what's happening in the browser to do local recording and stuff. But they're really-.

Alban: 6:53

When you say fat client, you mean like fat file system, like the thing that's on the computer. I mean like installable software.

Kevin: 6:59

Yeah, so like, if you want to run Zoom, you can just run that in a browser. But they really push you to download the Zoom software and install it on your computer, I'm guessing, because then they don't have to rely on the browser. They control everything but Riverside and Squadcast and Clean Feed and stuff they don't Like. You just run that through the browser. You don't have to install anything on your computer to use that software. So they are heavily dependent on what's going on in the browser and browsers get updated regularly. Again, this isn't our business, so it's just a bit of speculation, but browsers get updated regularly.

Kevin: 7:30

Lots of people run different versions of browsers. We can put two computers side by side that are both completely up to date and you might see the browser version is just different by, like, some tiny little number at the end of a very long string. Yeah, and these softwares are utilizing that to do all this recording, plus the local stuff, plus the syncing of the files at the end of the day, and I feel like it's just I don't know more fragile I think is the way I'm thinking about it than it probably should be for software that costs $30 a month. You know, professional, whatever they say, studio quality recording for remote podcast interviews. That's how this stuff's all being sold, but I don't think it is that. I think it's I don't know not as reliable as it should be.

Jordan: 8:06

Yeah, I will say you know. I mean we use Riverside for Buzzcast and I'm just so confused by it and, like I've said before, I'm not technically minded and so they record locally and then it uploads to the browser when it's complete. But the thing is is like almost every single episode we record. If we talk over each other which we do a lot the other person who is either like starts talking, or the person who's currently talking while someone else starts talking, their audio gets garbled and distorted. Else starts talking, their audio gets garbled and distorted. And so there's so many ends of sentences or something like that that I have to cut out every single episode because it gets garbled. And it's such a weird thing that's been happening and it's been happening for, like I don't know, over a year, maybe two years, like a long time. But I just accepted that that is the flaw with recording remotely.

Alban: 9:00

Why is that? Because if it's recording it remotely, it shouldn't really matter if it's uploaded later on. Like what does the garbling come?

Jordan: 9:07

from See. That's what doesn't make sense to me.

Kevin: 9:09

Yeah, it absolutely should not.

Jordan: 9:11

And my audio shouldn't be affecting your audio, kevin. No, it just doesn't make any sense and we lag because we're so far, like I'm, in a completely different side of the country and so, yeah, sometimes there's a lag and sometimes I will start talking because I think one of you guys aren't talking, and then I'll realize and I'll stop, and then the first part of whatever you're trying to say is completely like messed up.

Alban: 9:31

Yeah, so that's like a speed of light issue, right.

Kevin: 9:35

Yeah, not really. I know what you're saying, but it's not really a speed of light issue, it is an internet traffic issue. Yeah, it is latency. There's going to be some latency. Right, there will be some. I think clean feed is the software solution that's done the best in terms of low latency, remote recording and because their focus has been there, they have become the solution for a lot of like Hollywood studios, a lot of symphonies, a lot of musicians use them, because musicians have to be like if I'm playing bass on a track and you're playing drums on a track and Jordan's playing guitar, on a track it's one of the main use cases.

Kevin: 10:11

I didn't know that is that they are really good at low latency recording so that you come in at exactly the right time and so you can hear the drums playing and you know when to come in, and so that's less important in podcasting. But if latency is extremely high, that it does become a problem because there's awkward pauses or something like that. The conversation doesn't flow as naturally as it should be. So clean feed could be a good solution for the latency issue, but clean feed doesn't offer video and, like for Buzzcast, we don't need video, but we do like to see each other when we're recording. We don't need the video recorded, but we do like to see each other, because there's times we'll give each other hand signals, like you know, up your energy level, like you're saying good stuff, but we need to do this to each other all the time.

Alban: 10:51

That's like the most common hand signal, actually, that Kevin gives out.

Kevin: 10:55

Right or once in a while. One of us will do a.

Jordan: 10:58

Alvin just.

Alban: 10:59

Here's the issues with in-person recordings In the studio. I bumped into a table behind me and knocked over four podcast microphones.

Jordan: 11:08

How much money is that on the floor right now?

Alban: 11:12

This is a lot. This is a Rode Broadcaster, a PR 40, and a Rode PodMic.

Kevin: 11:20

Okay, okay, hey, let's put this stuff aside. Let's get back on topic.

Jordan: 11:24

All right, here we go, all right.

Kevin: 11:27

So the question I'm posing to anybody who's listening, who works in the podcast world, is is why are we doing things this way? Like Adobe podcasts right, adobe, huge company, infinite number of like technical resources right, adobe, huge company, infinite number of like technical resources? Why are you still deciding to rely on a browser as the main, like powerhouse engine driving your podcast recording solution? Why are we not just you know delivering a like installable chunk of software, like Zoom is done, that just becomes really reliable and does what it's supposed to do Does local recording and syncs it up after the recording is done, like uploads it to a place that whoever's going to edit that episode can download it? I don't understand it. Again, going back to the wedding photographer analogy, it's pretty high stakes. Why are we building businesses that are dependent upon browsers that get updated, sometimes multiple times a day and could change at any given moment and could break?

Alban: 12:17

your software. My guess is the browsers are more platform agnostic or closer to being platform agnostic. If you're trying to do an iPhone app, an Android app, a bunch of different PC apps, a bunch of Mac apps, a bunch of like random Linux apps and you're, like Chrome's, already figured out how to get installed on all of those and it will pretty much give me the same capabilities across the board, I'll take consistency and even if I lose a little couple of nines of reliability, but what I don't want to have to do is try to build custom apps for all of them. I mean, I feel like Zoom did that for video recordings. Zoom became the best video like software to talk to people, but then they added so many features that the product degraded and now it's like I feel like I use it way less and said now I use Whereby, which is in the browser? I don't know, but I imagine that's probably the reason, right yeah?

Kevin: 13:12

I mean we see a lot of discussions around this topic in the Facebook community that we run for Buzzsprout and it seems like this is not a problem that's unique. I don't want anybody to feel like we're harping on Riverside. Riverside is the tool that we use currently to record Buzzcast and we do consistently run into audio issues, which doesn't make sense because it's supposed to be local recordings. There should not be like digital audio artifacts unless one of our computers happened to be like slow or out of date or whatever and the computer got bogged down and caused some sort of digital artifact. But that's not the case. We run very high end computers. They're all brand new. We're not running anything else while we're recording.

Kevin: 13:50

Yeah, all the Jordan like we just talked about this before we recorded last time she completely reboots her computer before we record. Like we do all this stuff and we still have these problems. And we also see in our Facebook community that people who run squad cast have these problems and we tried a test episode on Adobe podcast and we ran into a little issue and like we haven't tried clean feed Cause again, clean feed doesn't have the video side and we like to see each other. But are we the only ones who are having this problem? No other people on our Facebook group are. So what is the solution?

Kevin: 14:17

I don't know, besides flying Jordan into the office which has its own set of problems, like Albin bumping into a bookshelf and knocking over all the microphones, all right. So there's the mystery. I don't know that we have a solution, but I think it's a good opportunity to open it up to feedback from anybody who's listening. If anybody from Riverside is listening and you can explain some of this, like drop us a comment, like maybe we can have you on the show to talk about what are the challenges involved. If anybody from Adobe podcasts or clean feed or anybody who wants to come on, I'm sure our audience would love to hear. And if you're a podcaster and you found a solution that really works well for you and you love it and you never switch and you never run into problems, let us know about that. Absolutely, maybe we need to try something different. Yeah, do it or try it. Try something different.

Alban: 14:57

Yeah, this is definitely a problem that you have for any feature launch is that the people who talk about it are the people who something broke, and for the person who's like, wow, everything went smoothly and easily, I'm so happy. They're always the ones who go on and move on with their life and do something else, right. So we're the complainers today because we've had a couple of bad recordings in a row.

Jordan: 15:16

That's true. That's all right, though. Tap the Texas Show link in the show notes to send in your responses and we will have you on the podcast, or you can give us some recommendations and until next time, keep podcasting.