How to Use the Podli Transcript Editor

Once Podli has processed each speaker track individually — AI noise removal, normalisation, and gating — it transcribes the audio and pauses to let you review the result. This is where you make editorial decisions: what stays, what gets cut, and what the final episode sounds like. The final mix, music, and mastering all happen after you finish editing.

Here's how to get the most out of the editor.

How the transcript editor works

The transcript is generated by WhisperX and attributed to each speaker by name. Every word in the transcript corresponds to a precise time range in the underlying audio. When you delete text, Podli marks those segments for removal. On finalisation, the cuts are applied directly to the individual speaker tracks — before they are mixed together — using a 50ms quarter-sine crossfade at each edit point to keep the result sounding natural.

You're not editing the waveform — you're editing the meaning, and the audio follows.

What to cut

Filler and verbal tics

"Um", "uh", "you know", "sort of" — these accumulate over a long interview and slow the pace of the episode. In the transcript editor, you can see exactly how often they appear and remove them in seconds. A ten-second delete in text that would take two minutes to locate and trim on a timeline.

False starts and restated sentences

When a speaker starts a thought, abandons it, and restates it cleanly, the transcript makes this immediately visible. Select from the false start to just before the clean version and delete. The crossfade handles the join.

Long silences and extended pauses

Podli's gating step removes most inter-sentence silence automatically. But extended pauses — a guest thinking for several seconds, an unexpected interruption — show up in the transcript as gaps between sentences. Selecting and deleting the blank space between two lines removes the pause.

Off-topic tangents

In a recorded interview, conversations often wander before returning to the main thread. The transcript makes it easy to identify where a tangent starts and ends, select the whole section, and cut it without touching the timeline.

What not to cut

Natural speech rhythm

It's tempting to tighten everything. But removing every pause and breath creates an unnaturally fast pace that listeners find exhausting. Leave natural pauses at the end of complete thoughts — they give the listener time to process what was said.

The first and last few seconds of each speaker turn

Podli's crossfades are designed to be smooth, but cutting right at the edge of a word can clip the leading consonant. Leave a beat of space before and after any edit point.

Skipping the editor

If you're happy with the recording and don't need to make any cuts, you can click straight through to finalise without making any edits. By the time the transcript editor appears, each speaker track has already been individually denoised, normalised, and gated — so in many cases the content is ready to approve and publish as-is.

Finalising your episode

When you're done editing, click Finalise episode. Podli applies all the cuts to the individual speaker tracks, mixes the result together, and masters the output to -16 LUFS.

If you added intro or outro music before processing — either from Podli's royalty-free library or your own uploaded track — it's automatically included in the final mix. The fade durations are set in Processing Options before you start. Podli remembers your music selection and fade settings across sessions, so you don't need to re-enter them each time.

The finished file is ready to upload directly to your podcast host — no further processing needed.

A note on accuracy

WhisperX is highly accurate on clear, well-recorded audio, but it occasionally misreads words — especially proper nouns, technical terms, or heavy accents. You can correct these directly in the editor. Correcting a transcription error doesn't affect the audio; it only updates the text. The transcript is a tool for navigating your episode, not the final deliverable.