Solutions

Rooster for podcasters

In closed beta · Not yet on sale

Rooster is a Mac video editor for podcasters who record their own episodes. Transcription runs on your Mac the moment recording stops, you cut by deleting words from the transcript, and your Rooster bill does not grow with the episode. It does not record remote guests, and it is in closed beta rather than on sale.

The job, most weeks

You record an episode - alone at a desk, or with someone in the room - and you publish it as audio, as a video version, or both. Between the recording and the upload there is an hour or two of listening back, cutting the false starts, tidying the sound, adding captions for the video cut and exporting the file.

That work is mostly reading, not compositing. There are no effects to design and no motion graphics to time. The whole job is finding the words you did not mean to say and removing them without leaving a jump, and doing it fast enough that the episode still goes out on the day you said it would.

Where the time goes

  • The meter

    Podcast episodes are long, and a long episode is exactly what a per-minute allowance charges for. Descript's paid tiers meter media minutes and AI credits separately, and unused credits do not roll over, so the month you record a double episode is the month the bill changes shape.

  • The upload

    A cloud editor cannot start until the file has arrived. An hour of 1080p is a real upload on a real connection, and it happens before you have made a single cut. Public feedback on Descript's own forums asks for offline editing for this reason, and recordings lost to sync failures are a recurring complaint.

  • The timeline

    Cutting an hour of speech by scrubbing a waveform is slow work, which is why text-based editing exists at all. What most tools do not offer is that interaction on media that never left your machine.

Competitor pricing and behaviour described above was checked in August 2026. The arithmetic is in the Descript pricing breakdown and the alternatives round-up.

How Rooster fits

  • Recording

    Camera, screen, or screen with camera, into a Rooster project. Device, resolution, aspect-ratio and countdown controls, framing guides, and a teleprompter for scripted segments. Recordings go to Downloads by default and are never silently overwritten.

  • Local transcription

    A new recording transcribes automatically as its project is created, in Rooster's own process. The default engine is Parakeet TDT v3, which on Rooster's fixtures matched whisper.cpp large-v3-turbo for accuracy at 13 to 28 times the speed; whisper.cpp stays selectable for the languages Parakeet does not cover. Episode length changes how long it takes and nothing else.

  • Transcript editing

    Click a word to move the playhead. Select a run of words and the header shows the word count and the measured duration of what you selected. Press Delete and the cut ripples across every track as one undoable edit. Correct is a separate action that fixes a mis-heard word without touching the media, and corrections survive a re-transcription.

  • Captions

    Four presets with immediate preview on the canvas, burned into the exported video, plus SRT and VTT sidecars from the same cues for the platforms that want a file.

  • Export

    H.264 MP4 or HEVC MOV at 720p, 1080p or the project size, with audio-only M4A, uncompressed WAV, SRT, VTT, transcript and Markdown alongside it. Rendered on the Mac, with progress and cancellation, defaulting to Downloads. Saving a file does not create a share link.

  • Studio Sound

    DeepFilterNet speech cleanup runs on the Mac, with a strength control and A/B playback so you hear exactly what it did to the room tone before you keep it. Like every effect in Rooster it is an undoable edit rather than a rewrite: the recording underneath is never modified.

  • Filler-word removal with review

    Every hesitation in the episode is listed with the words either side of it and a play button, so you hear the moment before you decide. Approve them one at a time or all at once and the approved set is cut as a single undoable ripple that snaps to measured silence. It runs on your Mac, so a two-hour episode costs no more to clean than a ten-minute one, and it reads English hesitations.

Every feature above is described in more detail on the features page. Planned launch pricing is $12.99 a month or $99 a year, with a $249 lifetime licence on the direct download, and every paid tier is unmetered - the reasoning is on the pricing page.

What Rooster will not do for you

  • No remote multitrack recording. If your show is two people in two places, Rooster does not capture each of them at full quality, and a remote recording tool still owns that job.
  • No podcast hosting, RSS feed or publishing. Rooster gives you a file and stops there.
  • No automatic speaker labels. Rooster does not decide who is speaking.
  • No AI voices, no speech synthesis and no dubbing or translation.
  • Mac only, on Apple silicon. There is no Windows, iPad or browser version, and none is planned.

This list is here because the alternative is a reader installing Rooster and finding out. If one of these is the job you need done, the alternatives page ranks tools that do it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I record a remote guest in Rooster?

No. Rooster records what is attached to your Mac: camera, microphone, screen, or screen with camera. A co-hosted show recorded across two locations needs a remote recording tool, and our Descript and Riverside comparison covers that ground honestly.

Does a longer episode cost more?

No. Transcription, effects and export all run on your Mac, so a two-hour episode and a ten-minute one cost the same in Rooster.

Can I use Rooster today?

Only if you are in the closed beta. Rooster is not on sale yet: a small group of solo creators and podcasters is using it on real projects, and you can apply to join on the closed beta page at rooster.cam/beta. Everyone else can download it at launch, and the waitlist is the way to be told when that happens.