This is the second post in a series focused on the absolute, simple basics of trying to get a podcast off the ground as a busy entrepreneur. The full series will answer questions I had and to which I couldn't get straight answers. It will also answer questions or provide simple advice I didn't know to consider. I hope something in this series will make your journey easier than mine was. You can read the first post for more background on me and my journey.
When you Google "podcast recording tool," Riverside is everywhere. And I mean everywhere. They have beautiful, compelling marketing videos. They have SEO-optimized articles for every question you could possibly think to ask. Those articles have corresponding podcast-style videos of impeccable quality.
As a beginner with minimal time to spare for this new effort, Riverside felt like a Godsend. It seemed like a slam dunk for getting me started publishing podcast content without drilling into professional tools. This company had figured it all out for me.
So I signed up, paid a few hundred bucks for the annual plan, and got started. Little did I know I had signed myself and two coworkers up for months of hair-pulling, wasted time, feeling like we were the problem, and doing research we never needed to do (sorry, Walter and Maddie).
Read on to learn about my journey with Riverside and why I wouldn't recommend it for anyone in my shoes. Before I continue, I would like to note that this is not intended as a knock on Riverside broadly. I am one person telling my particular story. There may be other use cases where Riverside is the right solution. I can't speak to any of those.
What we were trying to do was simple
We just wanted to sit down, have a conversation, and walk away with something we could publish. We wanted two people in the same room to talk, without stops, for about 40 minutes. Two cameras, two microphones, synced audio and video. No live streaming. No special effects. No fancy editing. That's it.
We were even starting from a blank slate, and putting our trust in Riverside. We didn't have cameras or microphones. We read their suggestions, and we took them, specifically optimizing for cameras that could maximize our potential with Riverside. Same for the microphones.
From what we initially found online, including articles and videos Riverside published, it seemed like Riverside would have no troubles. It seemed that we'd just need to have a laptop with microphone and camera for each speaker, enter the studio from each laptop, start recording, stop recording, then export.
This wasn't even close.
What we got from Riverside was echo and misalignment
From the very first recording, something was off. There was echo at least every 3 sentences. Unfortunately, we weren't sophisticated enough to understand the real issue from the start. So we assumed we'd made a mistake. How could it be Riverside?
So we went on a wild goose chase. Our first thought was that we'd just gotten unlucky. So we re-recorded the episode. Same issue.
Our next thought was some issue with misaligned software on our computers, both new MacBooks, or with our versions of Riverside. We double, triple, quadruple checked this. Same issue.
It was about this time that we realized the echo wasn't the only issue. Throughout the videos, at least one speaker's audio would fall out of sync with that speaker's video. So I found myself in iMovie, trying to see if I could get everything to match on a particular episode. And then a colleague found himself in Adobe Premier. The main theoretical advantage of Riverside was that we weren't supposed to need, or need to learn how to use, a video editing tool. We were supposed to get synced, ready-to-go recordings for easy export. We hadn't.
In any case, these efforts at manual syncing didn't work. Everything we tried made the problem worse. We kept recording and recording. We tried every button and feature, including the audio shift option, we could find in Riverside. We tried pausing episodes multiple times. We tried new microphones. We added sound dampening panels, new furniture, a sound-dampening curtain, and new laptops. Nothing worked. Our recordings kept having echo and out-of-sync audio and video.
All told, we recorded at least 15 hours of content that turned out to be unusable. We spent at least that many hours troubleshooting equipment, trying new settings, and watching tutorial videos. At the same time, we had professional recording people come into the exact same space to shoot other content for us. They set up, hit record, and everything came out perfectly. Zero echo or syncing issues.
Finding the answer: Riverside is fundamentally flawed
At some point during the troubleshooting spiral, I stumbled on a YouTube video that explained our exact audio-video sync and echo problem. It was from 2022. In it, a podcast- and audio-focused YouTuber described how he'd suddenly started having major issues with his Riverside recordings. Most of what he described went way above my head. But what made sense to me as an audio and video file novice was this: Riverside has an issue that makes it unusable for me as someone who doesn't have time to drill deep into the details of audio files.
The core issue at hand seemed to be something called "variable frame rate" (VFR). For some reason, RIverside's recordings were structured to be VFR video, not constant frame rate. Audio files, or at least the audio files used in Riverside, are constant frame rate (CFR). The result for us was files that drifted out of sync, making any attempt at matching both audios and both videos impossible.
I didn't do the same leg work as the YouTuber. It seems he dedicated his focus to getting to the core of the problem, including lots of frustrating support conversations. But from my experience, it seems nothing changed between 2022 and 2025. What Riverside was doing for us, under the hood, was genuinely complicated, the sync issues were a known limitation, and the workarounds involve exactly the kind of manual, technical editing work that we were using Riverside specifically to avoid.
Conclusion: I wouldn't recommend Riverside for someone just getting started
I believe that what Riverside is trying to do is genuinely hard. Recording high-quality separate streams for multiple people and syncing them reliably seems like a hard technical problem based on the research I did troubleshooting Riverside failures. But as someone just looking for something that works, the product didn't deliver on its promises.
If you are trying to record a two-person conversation, in person, and output high-quality videos of the conversations, I don't recommend Riverside. I spent too much money on software and equipment, too much time troubleshooting, and too much time in frustration figuring this out. I hope this article will spare you that same trouble.
I'll share more about how we now get things done, end to end, in a separate post. And as always, find me on Twitter or LinkedIn any time if I can help.
Bonus: Several other Riverside features were also a dud
The audio sync was the dealbreaker, but once I started looking at Riverside more critically, other gaps became hard to ignore.
Their AI editing and AI clips/highlights features needed so much manual correction that they were useless. The built-in editor is web-only, clunky, and slow. It's harder to use and feels less snappy than tools like CapCut. Transcripts were low quality. The publishing suite advertises distribution to major platforms, but when you drill into it, the integrations aren't all fully featured. I learned I'd need a separate tool anyway.
There was also a frustrating pricing surprise. I wanted my coworker to be able to host shows and set up recordings in what I thought would be our shared workspace. Turns out that requires a plan for which you have to talk to their sales team. I didn't get that far, as I'd finally had enough of Riverside. But I did some Reddit searches and learned that level of plan was extremely expensive: thousands and maybe even tens of thousands per year, even for a tiny operation. Not exactly built for two people trying to figure things out.
I spent hours watching Riverside's marketing content during all of this, trying to learn what I was doing wrong. Everything they publish is polished, specific, and technically accurate. But if you don't already know what questions to ask, you can't tell where the marketing stops and reality starts. It tells you exactly what the tool does. It just doesn't tell you whether it will actually work for your situation.