Resound and Adobe Podcast are two rather young products that build AI-powered tools for podcasters and creators. But what makes them different and which one is a better fit for you?
In this blog, we’ll show you what both tools can do so you can decide which one is better for you.
We’ll cover:
Resound is the AI podcast editor for creators. Built by the same team of Professional audio engineers that produced Culpable and 15 other #1 shows on Apple podcasts. Resound automates tedious editing tasks like finding and removing filler sounds, and long silences, mixing and mastering your podcast, and much more coming soon.
Resound officially launched in June of 2022 but started as an internal project at Resonate Recordings in 2019.
Adobe Podcast is a web app from Adobe that lets podcasters record, edit, and enhance their sound. Their flagship feature, Speech Enhance, automatically removes background noise and reverb from audio and works especially well on audio recorded on a smartphone or in a very noisy environment.
Adobe Podcast launched in Beta near the end of 2022 and remains in beta as of August 2023.
Both Resound and Adobe Podcast offer AI podcast mixing features in an online audio editor. They have a lot in common, but there are a few things that make Resound different.
In summary, Adobe Podcast is building a text-based editing tool for creators that offers other powerful AI features. Resound is building the most advanced AI audio editor. If you’re looking for a tool to automate your post-production then Resound is for you. But if you’re not yet convinced, please read on!
One of the core differences between Resound and Adobe Podcast is the editing experience itself. While Adobe Podcast offers a transcript-based approach to editing, Resound puts the focus on editing your waveform by displaying edits overtop of the waveform. The purpose of this workflow is to ensure that you have complete control of every single edit you make.
Review each edit one by one, finely adjusting the boundaries as needed. Our unique review process gives you total control over your edits while maintaining the promise of a faster editing experience.
We’ve been building and fine-tuning our own machine learning models since 2019 to specifically identify ums and ahs in your audio. Some might call it obsessive, but we believe in this problem and have the highest standards for solving it with accuracy and fidelity (and trust us, we’re still not done yet, but we’ve come a LONG way).
We didn’t outsource this problem to a third-party speech to text tool, like some tools do. Instead we trained our own machine learning models while collaborating with audio engineers. That means we have greater accuracy of the start and end time of each edit, sound smoother and more professional, and can pass along the additional control of our models to you.
We’re also just getting started. We’ve been hyper-focused on filler sounds (ums, ahs, ers) but will soon build on top of our work to expand to additional problems like filler words (like, so, right, you know), and much more.
We believe AI should be used to automate tedious work, but never at the expense of replacing your creative work entirely. Practically speaking, this means that every feature we build in Resound has two audiences in mind: The hobbyist creator and the paid professional audio engineer. Resound started as a project to help empower our internal team at Resonate Recordings work faster, and do less tedious work, but our goal was never to replace those individuals. Rest assured that everything we build will consider both the hobbyist and the professional.
Resound is being built by the same team of professional audio engineers behind Culpable and 15 other #1 shows on Apple Podcasts. The original Resound team was spun out from Resonate Recordings in 2022, led by Jacob Bozarth, and we continue to work closely with other Audio Engineers at Resonate to get oversight and feedback on new features. We also have a unique data agreement between our companies that gives us ethical access to see how professional audio engineers make editing decisions.
Resound is the most advanced AI audio editor. Our mission is to automate post-production for podcasters and creators so they can save time. We’re not interested in building an all-in-one platform. Trust the best remote recorder for capturing your voice, trust the best hosting platform for distributing your show, and trust Resound for the fastest and most accurate podcast editing. We’ve spent the past eight years editing podcasts, and the past five building the machine-learning models that power Resound.
The Resound Editor has gone through many improvements in 2023, but it’s still lacking a few key features that are expected from other Audio Editors. You can’t (yet) see multiple tracks at the same time, arrange tracks on the timeline by dragging them around, or add fade-ins and outs to the end of clips in the editor.
Because Resound has been laser-focused on solving the problem of detecting ums and ahs with our own machine-learning models we have not yet expanded to detecting other types of mistakes (like, right, you know). But in the near future, we plan to add this.
Resound is hyper-focused on automating post-production, which means we don’t offer remote recording, hosting, text-to-speech, or voice cloning services. If you’re looking for a tool that offers these in one place, then Adobe Podcast wins in this category.
Adobe’s Speech Enhance is by far the best feature of their product. It is an incredibly powerful AI background noise remover and sound enhancer. You can upload a recording of your iPhone recorded next to a train and it will make it sound like you recorded in a studio. It’s pretty great.
If you hate editing waveforms or simply don’t know how then Adobe’s simple text-based audio editor will be easy for you to understand. They call their editor the “Studio.” It’s a simple interface that lets you record or upload files, delete text by highlighting a word and clicking delete, add a fade in and fade out to a track, place music, and arrange multiple audio files in chronological order.
Adobe has plenty of experience creating high-quality Stock assets for creators, and they are bringing those talents and resources into Adobe Podcast too. You can access royalty-free music and transition sound effects for your podcast to bring the content to life. This feature is available for both free and paid accounts.
Adobe Podcast offers a simple mic check tool that will use AI to analyze your recording. All you do is record a short clip of you talking, and they’ll show you your distance to the mic, background noise levels, gain, and echo. You can then adjust your setup and re-test until you get your sound just right.
One thing we’ve observed, however, is that it can be too extreme, and so if you run a file that was actually recorded in a studio or on a great setup through the tool it comes out sounding a bit worse. You can upgrade to a paid plan to unlock the ability to adjust the level of enhancement the tool makes though.
The main limitation of the Studio is that you cannot make any edits on a waveform. That means you get very little transparency into what is happening to your audio file under the hood. For example, if you click on an “um” or a dot (which represents silence) and delete it you have no context about how long that section was, where the start and end points of the section were, or anything else. You can only play before and after to see how it sounds, but sometimes that isn’t enough.
Alternatively, Resound offers a unique gamified editing experience on a waveform, so you can precisely adjust the boundaries of each edit you make confidently.
Adobe Podcast sadly does not offer video support. Perhaps in the future, this will be added, but for now, you cannot import videos or export them. If you want to edit your video in Adobe Podcast, you’ll have to manually convert your video file into an audio file before uploading it to Adobe Podcast.
Alternatively, Resound lets you import video files and automatically strips out the audio so you don’t have to convert files yourself. Resound also offers MP4 video exports!
As we mentioned above, Resound has some weaknesses like everyone else. But we’re working hard to fix them as quickly as possible. Here are a few things you can expect in Resound soon…
Are we missing something? Request a feature in Resound here.
Resound and Adobe Podcast are two excellent products that offer AI-powered audio editing.
If you’re looking to remove background noise from a super low-quality recording or prefer editing text instead of a waveform, you might want to try out Adobe’s Speech Enhance.
But if you want greater control over the accuracy of your edits, try Resound’s unique editing experience that combines accuracy and speed. And get the benefit of the most advanced AI editor for detecting filler sounds, silences, and other common mistakes in your audio.
Still on the fence? Try Resound for free.
Resound's team is building the future of podcast editing: An AI podcast editing app for creators. Here at Resound we're writing about the creative process to help content creators thrive. Picture is Ernst Chladni, the inspiration for our brand. Hear his story at resound.fm/about
