( The category )
The podcast finisher: raw recording in, publish-ready episode out
A podcast finisher is the tool that handles the last mile of an episode: it cleans the voice, cuts the parts that should not be there, scores the episode with music, sets the loudness your platform expects, and exports one file. Recording is the easy half. Finishing is where episodes get stuck.
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What finishing actually means
Five things stand between a recording and a published episode, and every show does all five — by hand, by outsourcing, or by tool. Clean the voice so the room stops being audible. Cut the fillers, the dead air and the tangent that went nowhere. Score it, so the cold open and the outro have shape. Set the loudness, because Spotify and Apple expect different numbers. Export once, as the file the host wants.
Editors give you a timeline and let you do all five yourself. Cleanup services do one. A finisher does the set, in order, and hands back something you can publish.
- Clean the voice
- Cut what should not be there
- Score the episode
- Set platform loudness
- Export one file
Why it is a category and not a feature
The five steps are not independent. Cut a minute of speech and the music underneath has to re-balance. Move a clip and the chapter markers have to ride along. Duck the music by signal level and it swells in every pause; duck it by where the voice clips actually are and it behaves. A tool that owns all five can keep them consistent. A chain of tools that each owns one cannot — which is why the chain is where the afternoon goes.
That is the whole design argument for Cast: one place, five steps, and the edit is the thing everything else is derived from.
What Cast does at each step
Voice cleanup runs with a strength dial and an Off position, and it never overwrites the original. The transcript is the editing surface — delete a paragraph and the audio goes with it; fillers are counted per speaker, silences over your threshold are listed, and every cut snaps to a quiet point and stays reversible. Music is generated for this episode, sized to the segment, and ducks itself under the voice. Loudness is a platform preset: −14, −16 or −23 LUFS with true-peak headroom. The export is one file, with captions, chapters and — on Plus and Max — a licence record for every generated track.
- Transcript is the editor
- Cleanup is a dial, not a bake
- Ducking follows the clips
- Licence record in the export
Where a finisher is the wrong tool
If you need to record remote guests, ship a video version, run a multitrack music session, or process a back catalogue from a script, a finisher is the wrong shape and Cast will not pretend otherwise. It is built for one episode at a time, in a browser, ending in a file you upload to your host.
FAQ
01Where do I start with a new episode?
On the Home screen. It walks you through your first episode in five steps — add audio, clean it up, edit by text, add music that ducks, export — and the New project button asks how you want to begin. You do not need to know the product to make the first episode; the product tells you.
Read more →02What does editing by transcript look like?
Select any run of words in the Voice Editor and a menu appears. You can delete them (the audio is cut and the gap closes), ignore them (the audio is muted, the timing stays), correct the wording, mark a chapter, assign a speaker, or copy and paste words elsewhere.
Read more →03How does Cast set loudness for each platform?
Apple Podcasts wants −16 LUFS; Spotify and YouTube want −14 LUFS; broadcast (EBU R128) wants −23 LUFS. Most tools make you type that number in. Cast ships the target with the platform — pick where you are publishing and it normalizes to that, with true peak at −1 dB. (Master is the exception: no normalization, no ceiling — untouched on purpose.)
Read more →04Can Cast publish my podcast for me?
Cast finishes the episode; your host distributes it. Cast is deliberately host-agnostic — no RSS, no lock-in — and the file it hands you is already normalized to the target platform's loudness, so it drops into any podcast host without a re-master.
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