Behind the Blog: Too Many Tabs and Generative AI Hype

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss exciting new updates to the podcast, having too many tabs open, and the generative AI boom.

JOSEPH: I’m gonna give you two Behind the Blogs for the price of one. First off, about the podcast: as you may have read or seen this week, we’ve made some major changes to the podcast. Nothing to do with format, I think we’re all very happy with that and I think listeners are too (I hate it personally when a podcast shakes up its format too much, throws me off). But we’re putting a bigger emphasis on video and improving the overall quality of the audio.

Up until this point, we’ve been using Riverside to record. This is a browser-based tool we all log into, it records our audio and video locally, and uploads it. That sounds great, but Riverside has a lot of issues. Sometimes the tracks don’t sync. The audio level normalization can introduce weird artifacts that actually make the voices sound worse. The company is introducing a bunch of AI features that look like they’ll save time, while not improving the tool’s general reliability. We have been using Riverside to make it easier for us to go from recording to finished product, but the output we’re automatically getting from them still requires a fair bit of work. On top of that I’m not a trained audio engineer, and sometimes mistakes are made in the podcast mostly during recording itself.

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