Podcast video editor for Mac

The job, most weeks

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 ran at 13 to 28 times the speed of whisper.cpp large-v3-turbo on Rooster's fixtures and, measured on 20 October 2026 on 21.6 minutes of one speaker's recordings, got 1.3% of words wrong, level with Descript; 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 or HEVC in an MP4 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 Voice

  DeepFilterNet speech cleanup runs on the Mac, with a strength control and a switch on its row that plays the original again, so you hear exactly what it did to the room tone. Like every effect in Rooster it is an undoable edit rather than a rewrite: the recording underneath is never modified.

• Speaker labels, typed by you

  Rooster does not detect who is speaking, so you label the speakers by hand. Select some of what one person said, right-click, choose Label the speaker… and type their name. It heads that passage in the script and goes into the Captions list and the SRT and VTT files.

• 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. Rooster is $4.99 a month at the founder price or $9 a month billed annually ($108 a year), or $249 once for a lifetime licence, each after a 14-day free trial. The founder price is locked in for as long as you stay subscribed and is open to the first 250 subscribers who join by 10 January 2027. Once it closes, monthly billing for new subscribers is $12.99. 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 detect who is speaking: every speaker label is a name you type.
• 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