Solutions
Rooster for podcasters
In active development · Not yet released
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 nothing is metered. It does not record remote guests, and it is in active development rather than released.
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
Working today
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.
Working today
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.
Working today
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.
Working today
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.
Working today
Export
H.264 MP4 or HEVC MOV at 720p, 1080p or the project size, with audio-only, 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.
In development
Studio Sound
DeepFilterNet speech cleanup runs on the Mac today, with a strength control and A/B playback. It is not counted as finished because the bundled helper still needs to be signed as part of the application before Rooster can ship it through the App Store.
In development
Filler-word removal with review
The plan is a review list with context and timestamps before anything is cut, run against a local model rather than a metered cloud call. It is specified and not built.
Every feature above is described in more detail, with the same statuses, on the features page. Planned launch pricing is $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a lifetime licence announced at launch, 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 collaboration, comments or cloud projects. Projects are files on your Mac, so there is no editing session to share.
- No AI voices, no speech synthesis and no dubbing or translation.
- No automatic speaker labels. The subtitle formats carry them and the export writes them, but nothing yet decides who is speaking.
- 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 costs the same as a ten-minute one: nothing beyond the price of the app. There are no media minutes and no AI credits anywhere in the design.
Can I use Rooster today?
Not yet. Rooster is in active development and has not been released. The features described above as working are working in development builds; the waitlist is the only way to be told when there is something to install.