We Built Our Own Reliable Remote Recording Software

We stop trusting browser-based remote recorders and explain why reliability matters more than features when you only get one shot at a great conversation.

 Kevin shares the Mac-only (for now) native app we’ve been building at Buzzsprout and how we pair it with Zoom or Google Meet while it records clean, local files. 

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Why We Built New Recording Software

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Why are you so pale? I don't know. It's it's a mixture of genetics and also this lighting. I don't know how I've got to figure out how to fix the lighting in here, but I get behind the camera and I'm like, whoa, that's like a ghost.

Jordan 0:12

Well, how'd your voice?

Kevin 0:14

Um everything is off with Alban today. Yeah, as long as you're like a ghost the week before.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

That that hasn't changed. But you were just in the Florida Keys. This is this is dark for me. I I think there's there's there's something going on, maybe some processing the way that Apple is doing studio light. Let's see. I turned that off.

Jordan 0:36

There's something weird, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Even more pale. That that almost went the opposite direction.

Jordan 0:42

That's so crazy. So you're in the Florida Keys. Is that why your voice is gone?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

No, my voice is gone exactly from one play at the Jaguars game. And I've never lost my voice like in a moment.

Kevin 0:56

You're about to head to a podcast conference. Usually you lose your voice at the conference, not before.

Jordan 1:01

I was just thinking that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

One of the good things about the podcast conference is everybody else is really good at talking. And so I'll focus on being a listener. And maybe I'll learn a lot more this time.

Jordan 1:13

Elva's just gonna be doing like a lot of the silent nods.

unknown 1:16

Great point. Yes.

Jordan 1:19

Well, it's been a while since we've had you on, Kevin. I know it's it's kind of it may not be as long for our listeners because we did record a few episodes like up front and then you know, sprinkled a little Kevin throughout you being at the end.

Kevin 1:36

But if you were around the Buzz Sprout office, you would know that I was gone for a little while. Yeah.

Jordan 1:40

So what were you doing? Were you like tinkering around in a workshop or I did a lot of stuff.

Kevin 1:46

And I want to share some of the stuff that I did with our audience today. Because we built some new software. So I spent a little bit of time away from the office. And when I say away from the office, like away from the day-to-day and working on projects that we know have value and experimented with things that we we aren't so sure how valuable they are. And I'm at a point where I'm like, I think they have some value. And I think that we're ready to invite some people into the experience. So I want to talk about them, share them with anybody who listens to this podcast, and then at the end tell you how you can maybe try and experiment with some of this stuff that we've been building that's sort of off the main branch of what Bud Sprout has traditionally done. So it should be fun. We've teased around this idea before. People have asked us what do we use to record our podcast? We are all in usually in different locations. Once in a while, we're all in the same office, but that's that's definitely the exception to the rule. Jordan is out in Idaho, Alvin is in Jacksonville, I'm in Jacksonville, but he's out at the beach and on more center of town. About we're about 20 minutes apart. So we do remote recordings regularly.

Jordan 2:52

Yeah.

Kevin 2:52

In order to facilitate remote recordings, uh, we use remote recording software and we've tried everything and we hit various pain points in doing that. A lot of the stuff is web-based. I don't need to mention all of them. You know all of them, you know, everything from WebEx to Riverside to script, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything. And we I've I've shared the stream before and it's resonated with you guys. And so I decided to utilize um my it feels weird to say expertise, but uh, I'm a software builder. It's it's what I've done. It's my trade, it's my uh profession. And with the help of AI-assisted coding, I can do more than I ever could before. And so I've I've been a traditional like web-based software builder, but my vision for what a good remote recording software would be is not in the web-based world because I think there's so much overhead that gets carried in trying to run complicated software through a web browser.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

And we talked about this before. I mean, yeah, the benefit of stuff running in a browser is everyone can install it and it can run on lots of different types of devices. And if it works in Chrome on the Windows, it's gonna be very similar to Chrome on OS X. And if you can maybe you can support Linux too, and you can imagine this just feels so much better. We developed once and it works everywhere well. You mentioned a few, but Jordan and I once we went through in one day and tried eight different web-based recorders and got some weird result out of every one of them. Right. I don't think it's a I don't think it's like people don't care to make their software any good. I think it's trying to do all this stuff through a browser is very, very, very, very hard. And we talked about, man, it would be cool if somebody wanted to build this all as a native app really for video podcasters like us.

Jordan 4:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Right. Eventually Kevin got to the spot, he goes, fine, I'll do it myself.

Kevin 4:49

I think about it like this the the simplest way that I can think to explain it to somebody who's not a programmer is the if you build web-based software, the web browser becomes the operating system of which your software runs on.

Jordan 5:01

Oh.

Kevin 5:02

Okay.

Jordan 5:02

Okay.

Kevin 5:02

And so it's nice that that operating system runs on lots of different types of computers. A Linux computer, a Mac computer, a Windows computer, whatever. That same browser, that engine, can run in all of them. And so if yours runs in that, it runs on all of those things. Wonderful. Um, the other thing that becomes difficult is it runs slightly different in all of those things. And there's various different versions. So, like, you know, your web browser says, oh, there's an update available from time to time. And so there's the latest version, there's the version that came out last week, there's a version that came out two weeks before that, and there's somebody who like never updates their computer running an old OS and they can't get the latest version, and you're trying to support all that stuff because everyone just expects that it's just a web page, it should work in any browser, but it's it's actually very difficult. And for most things, it's totally fine. You're building an email client or you're building um a podcast. I guess hosting company. Yeah, exactly. It's fine because we're not asking a whole lot of these things, right? You're you're just you're basically rendering HTML and CSS and some JavaScript, and then the server takes care of all the super complicated stuff. But for things, the the analogy that I started using when I'm thinking about recording, especially podcast episodes, you are entering the wedding photography business, which is like one of the most stressful businesses that I could imagine being in because there's an event that is taking place in real time once. Yeah. Like ideally, you have one wedding. I know a lot of people have multiple, but ideally, this event, this wedding is happening one time and you are in charge of capturing it all like on film and video. And if you mess that up, then it's a big problem.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

And it's why you sometimes will see there's two people taking photos, they both have two cameras, they both have backup SD cards, because you don't get two shots at it. You get one shot. And if you miss the kiss at the end of the ceremony, you missed it. Yeah, and someone is gonna be really upset that they paid you six thousand dollars or whatever to take photos and you missed the one photo.

Jordan 6:58

That sounds a lot like recording a perfect guest interview, too. Yeah, that's one shot.

Kevin 7:05

Right. And so the product becomes just it's not just recording, it's more like um reliability becomes the product, right? So, like whatever you do, reliability has to stay the most important thing. And I think when you talk about software of that level of criticality, then native becomes a much more compelling choice.

Jordan 7:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

And native being like an app installed on my computer, it's sitting there, I open it up, and it's not using a web browser. It's recording using native tools on my operating system.

Kevin 7:39

Yeah, it's using as much of the native operating system to do as much of what it has to do as possible because that stuff is built into the operating system. And so it's it's just hardened, hardened and solid and reliable in a way that uh like browser software can never be.

Jordan 7:57

Yeah, we've had so many instances where we're recording using like a browser software. And even though a lot of them say that it's uh local recording, I've noticed that if someone's in spotty internet, it the recording dips, even though they say it's local. So I just, yeah, and I'm not technical enough to understand why that happens, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, we didn't even mention all of the, yeah, if one person has bad internet, which is pretty much all the time. If one person doesn't set up their mic the right time, which is almost all the time, it's like this problem gets exponentially more difficult. And you add on top, you get one shot, you got this big named interview to show up, and they showed up and it didn't work perfectly. Yeah, and it's just a totally different ball game. But it's like the failure mode is very different. You get one chance to at the wedding, you get as many times as you want to capture stock photography. Maybe that's the analogy. Like stock photography, you take the photo one time and you sell it 10,000 times. And so you don't really care if like they tried to shoot uh some photos and it didn't work out that day and the it was overcast, so they shot the next day. Didn't matter for anybody. Stock photography came out one day later, no big deal. But if you missed the wedding, it's over and you're never getting those photos back.

Jordan 9:16

Yeah.

Kevin 9:17

So that is uh a challenge that I decided to take on. And we so about five months ago, we had the first version of this software. We call the software session, uh idea being like a recording session. And it is a native application, only runs on Mac OS right now, and it does local recording only.

Jordan 9:39

Yeah.

Kevin 9:39

This is a mental challenge for people to get over. I I remember when I pitched the idea to Alvin and Jordan, I had to explain it a few times before they got it. But all it does when you load it up is it gives you, it shows you if you're recording audio and video, or you can you can do audio only or audio and video. We do audio and video now. And it shows you your microphone with your levels and it shows you your camera. You set that up and then you park it. Like if you're the guest. You just park it away. Jordan, who is our host, she loads hers. She says, I'm the host, and she sees the same thing. She sees her audio levels and her video, and then she has the controls to start and stop the recording. I don't have them as the guest, only Jordan has them. And it requires, but it doesn't show me. Jordan doesn't see me, and I don't see Jordan. That's the that's the hard part for people to understand how this thing is working. So the question is, how do we have a live conversation where we can see each other and hear each other? And the answer to that is actually simple, but it's hard to wrap your head around. Use whatever you want. Use FaceTime. Use we use Google Meet, use Microsoft Teams, use Zoom, use whatever. It doesn't matter. That is facilitating the conversation, but that's not what's being recorded. What's being recorded is session is recording your audio and your video locally. And then when Jordan stops the recording, it uploads that to a server. And then Jordan downloads all the source files from as many people who are on the who are in the session or on the call.

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Jordan 11:28

And it's truly local because whenever someone's internet dips in Google Meet, I I still have like that.

(Cont.) Why We Built New Recording Software

Jordan 11:40

Where I go, oh, oh no, they're audio. And then I'm like, no, it's that's just the internet. It's it's fine on their computer. And then when I get the file, it's perfect.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

And and the way that you know it's local is there is no other piece to this app. It's a double-ender recorder that's true on each person's computer. On mine, it just says is a video of me and it's audio from me. And it's just recording that and it does a really good job of that one little piece. And then the bonus feature is that at the end of this recording, it'll send that video to Jordan as a big old six gigabyte file or whatever. Yeah.

Jordan 12:19

Um, it's huge.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

The reason other people are not doing it this way is because I think it takes a little bit more to think through and mentally wrap your head around, okay, I've actually got myself on two different screens because over on the right, I've got Google Meet open and I can see all three of us. And over on the left, I can just see me in the recorder. And the second reason is because when it's done in the browser, you don't have access to write these just absolutely massive files as easily, you know, segment and eight gigabytes. So they're often trying to send them in real time because they want people to be like, hey, recording's done. Okay, cool. 98% of that's already uploaded, last two percent are done. And with the way we're setting it up is sometimes it does take a couple of minutes because I'm uploading a big file all at once, and Jordan's getting a big file all at once. But the upside is I would say every single browser-based solution we had in the past, it was like 85, 90 percent of the time it was great. And about 15, 10% something bad happened, and we rerecorded, or we were frustrated with the audio, or Jordan's cutting out bits where something went off. And now it's a 100% of the time this works. Uh Kevin just said, okay, over the last two months, what did uh what did you two experience? And I was like, Yeah, we were eight for eight and no stress, no fear that something went wrong. And it's delivering on only the one promise. If you use this, your wedding photography is gonna work a lot better.

unknown 13:57

Yeah.

Kevin 13:59

Yeah, it's actually the scariest software product I've ever built in my life because like job number one is reliability. And anybody who's built software for any amount of time, you know, like bugs are just reality. Like it, you're going to run into bugs. It's scary, it's hard to build something like this, and it's gonna probably take a long time for us before we get to the point where we're willing to release it to the world and put Buzzsprout's name on it. But uh where I am today is I am willing to say, hey, we've got a lot of Buzzsprout customers, and a small subset of them are big enough fans of BuzzSprout and maybe the three of us personally that they listen to the show. So if you listen to the show and you run Mac OS, it is a Mac only app right now. Again, we'll we'll change that over time, but right now it's Mac. And you do a podcast remotely, ideally with the same person every week. It's not great for guests right now because every time you have a guest, you'd have to explain how this works and teach them. It's not super user-friendly, like out of the box yet. And again, that's another place that we'd have an improvement. But I found myself asking, like, it's worked well for us for five months. It could be working well for other people who have shows similar to ours as well. And so I would like to get a few more people, we'll give a few more people the opportunity to experience what we've we've been experiencing. Um, we love it. We

Testing Invite And Backup Strategy

Kevin 15:12

think it works great. I want to get more feedback. I want to get more people who are willing to roll the dice with us and say, I'll help you test this. And that's it's a big ask because we're basically saying, uh, we're new to this wedding photography business, but let us come shoot your wedding.

Jordan 15:29

That's really what I was thinking.

Kevin 15:31

I understand. I don't want anyone super mad if we blow your interview. Pod News Weekly Review did one video episode a month or two ago and they used session to do it. They ran a backup at the same time. So they recorded their audio in clean feed at the same time they ran session. And I'm glad they did because for whatever reason, they weren't able to capture the audio perfectly through session. It might have been uh like a user setting issue or something. I've made a lot of updates since then. So I don't know exactly what the issue is. But I would say anybody who decides to take us up on this offer, please run a backup. So if you like record in Descript or Adobe Podcast or Riverside or whatever, like keep doing that. But this can run alongside of that. They're they're completely compatible. And you have to run something else anyway to be able to do the real-time conversation piece. Yeah, that's the that's the offer. That's the invitation. And if you want to do it, I think the way, the fun way for you to tell us that you're interested is use the fan mail link. And just remember, when you give us the fan mail link, please give us a way to contact you. I mean, we can reply to the fan mail as long as it's a text, it's not a voicemail. Even with voicemail, you could send us an email, but just say, hey, I think I'm a good fit and I'd like to try it out. And then I can send you a link to run session and you can start recording the way that we record.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Can I make one more request? Sure. I like the idea of the backup and the real-time communication being another browser-based recorder. Run them both and then look at the video quant content at the end. Yeah. Because one of the I don't think it's a theory at this point is that all of the hey, this is a totally not compressed hundred percent 4K file that's being streamed in real time. It's all good to go. Right. I don't believe it. And like I want to believe it. I think that like the promise is good. And yet I've gotten so many compliments on the video that I've got here. It's the same camera. I've had this exact same 720p camera since I don't know, years now. I don't know, five years. And I'd never gotten compliments on, hey, that looks really clear. Why what is that? And then I all of a sudden started getting them as soon as we recorded with this. And the content there and the quality is higher. Right. And so when people are saying it's 4K for sure, 1080p, we promise. I don't know what it is, but there's something in that pipeline from the comes off the sensor of my camera and it goes through a bunch of wires, and on the other end, it's on YouTube and it's blurry.

Kevin 18:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

I don't know how the internet works, man. There's a series of pipes out there.

Kevin 18:11

Yeah. But run it through both pipes. There's 100% through the session pipe. There has to be compression introduced. And it goes back to what you said earlier was like uh a remote recording tool wants to make it so that when you're done with the recording, you have to keep that browser window open for as short a time as possible for the files to finish transferring up. The great thing about session is session takes longer. When Jordan stops the recording, it might take five or 10 minutes for Alban and I'd files to upload, but it doesn't really matter because session has this cool little thing called mini mode. It's kind of like minimizes the screen up, but like in the top right window. And you can do any other thing on your computer while that's us uploading in the background. It doesn't matter. Uh and it runs itself. You don't have to do anything. And so, yes, 100%. It's going to take longer when the recording is done for it to then upload because we're not eating your bandwidth while you're recording. It is just saving to your local computer.

Jordan 19:01

And what's nice about that is on these uh web-based apps, there's always like the awkward thing. Like if someone's internet is especially slow, you're just kind of like still sitting in the room together and like trying to make small talk after the recording. But with session, because I can't see you, I can't hear you, you can't see me, you can't hear me. We just close out Google Meet, like bye. And then I leave that in the side and like no one can see us, whatever we're doing. Yeah. All right. Well, I I love the session recorder. We've been using it, as we said, for months, and it is so amazing. So I'm really excited that our listeners can finally also use it. So if you want to take part in that, go ahead and tap the send us fammail link in the show notes to let us know. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.

unknown 19:50

All right.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

So I think I just had one of my worst podcast microphone experiences the last few years. What?

Post Show: Is There A Podcaster On Board?

Jordan 19:59

Worse than your Q2U going out?

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Oh yeah. Uh, but it was not my microphone, and I don't know what brand it was, but I can tell you it's easily repairable and it's very critical.

Jordan 20:15

What happened?

SPEAKER_00 20:15

I was flying back from Miami. Uh we were down at the Keys, and I needed to be back on Sunday. So Saturday night at 10 45, I have a flight from Miami to Jacksonville. And it was the first time that I've taken an American Airlines flight in years. I'm a Delta guy. And Delta, it just feels like it always goes well. And the few times it doesn't, they're like, we're gonna make it right. Here's a bunch of points, here's a voucher, we're sorry, we really wanna make it right. American Airlines, the flight gets delayed, I don't know, a dozen times. They switch the plane, all this stuff. We get on, we're on the tarmac, we're ready to go, we're behind, but at least we're getting out of here and we're in line. They go, Hey guys, uh, I got an issue with the microphone. Well, the backup microphone. Uh yeah, it's it's just not working. We try to set, reset it. It's not gonna be a big deal. We're just gonna go back and we're getting a new mic.

Jordan 21:15

For the cockpit or what?

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Which in my mind, I'm like, clearly, there's at least another backup because you're talking to us now. There's another mic system that you're able to use. You know, they jiggled the cord, they unplugged, replugged, whatever. They get up there, an hour and 20 minutes later, they go, so we don't have anybody who actually knows how to fix the mic, but we've definitely called somebody. They're on the way. And no joke, the I guess the FAA rule is like three hours, they have to start letting you off the plane if you want to get off. Yeah. And we started getting some unruly passengers. We took off at three hours and one minute. We were like, Oh my, they're driving away. And I don't know if the guy with the mic is jumping off at the last second or what. But it I was just laughing. I was like, can I get up there and see what mic we've got? XLR cable? I got it, dude. It's uh condenser mic. I know it, I know what our problem here is.

Jordan 22:11

Alvin, have you seen there's a trend that is on like TikTok and YouTube and Instagram? And it's a trend of people in the uh airplane seat, and there's a quote saying, like, is there anyone on here that can copy and paste a spreadsheet? And they're just like, This is my moment, like getting up the seat.

SPEAKER_00 22:28

That was you. That was your moment.

Jordan 22:31

You did. You literally had it. We just we need someone who knows some microphones.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

It's really not even that I know microphones. I'm like, I've troubleshot a lot of audio setups. I was doing it for Kara today of like, hey, let's unplug everything real quick and plug it back in. But then when you get up to the cockpit and you start unplugging stuff, everyone gets mad.

Jordan 22:50

That's wild.

Kevin 22:51

Yeah. On one hand, I I kind of hope that their system is wildly different than anything that we use as amateur podcasters. But on the other hand, it's probably just like way older and less sophisticated.

Jordan 23:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

There were multiple systems. I know that everything in Airlines is redundant, and that's why they are so safe. Um, you know, they're they're even beyond the wedding photography business. It's if this plane doesn't work out, I'm gonna be much more upset than if you missed a couple photos at the wedding.

Kevin 23:20

That's true. Anytime I feel nervous about building the session app and being in the wedding photography business, I think about this interview I've read one time about people who wrote soft, like the original software for NASA, like on all the way through the early 90s or something. I think there's a book I read in the 90s. And they they were talking about the criticality of the software they wrote. It's like if your spreadsheet like goes down, you lose some numbers. If our software goes down, people die. And like that was the software they were building. And so anytime I get freaked out about like, oh, what if we lost a podcast recording? It would be terrible. But no one's gonna die. I hope. Yeah. Like, like whatever you're podcasting about, I hope. Well, it's not life and death.

Jordan 23:55

Well, you know who would know if there was like a second set of like microphones in the cockpit or how it works or what kind of microphones they use is Rich from two guys on a plane. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yes, yeah. I'm an expert.

Jordan 24:06

Rich can totally tell us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

Rich could Rich would have been the person that has said, Hey, the mic's not working, and he's like, This is my moment of the case.

Kevin 24:14

I'm already allowed up for the cockpit podcaster and an airline expert.