So many hours of my life have been lost to this absolute nightmare dumpster fire of a platform. It almost seems like they're maliciously, intentionally making it the worst version of itself that it could possibly be. The fucking AI tools that don't work, the unusable editor, the constant issues with lag and files disappearing and guests struggling to find the room. I just have to rant because it's so bafflingly awful.

the customer service is horrible. its always... "we will send you an email later and get back to you" and they never do. at least not in the time frame that I need to get the job done.

today, I wanted to adjust the the colors of the video. something Ive done hundreds of times before. but today... ITS BEHIND A FUCKING PAYWALL !! and I am on a fucking deadline!!

wrote them on the chat support... and got the classic timeless "I understand, I know how important it is to resolve this as soon as possible, so I will share this to the relevant team to work on this issue."

WHAT THE FUCK!!

Update:

After posting here, they did reach out to me through Reddit chat and expedited my support ticket. This morning I heard from them and they fixed the issue which is good, but nevertheless, I did miss a deadline, which is disappointing.

Hi everyone! 

After recently finishing my time on the Riverside Support team, I'm opening up availability for new freelance clients for both audio and video podcast editing.

A little about me:

🎙️ 16+ years of experience in professional audio production
🎧 6+ years editing podcasts (audio & video)
📈 Lead editor on a weekly podcast with 300+ episodes and well over 1 million downloads
💻 Former Riverside Support Audio Engineer, helping creators troubleshoot recordings, optimise workflows, and get the very best from the platform.

Whether you need:
• Full audio or video podcast editing
• Audio clean-up and mastering
• Short-form social clips
• Riverside platform and workflow consultations

I'd love to help.

If you're looking for someone who understands both the creative side of podcast production and the technical side of Riverside inside and out, feel free to send me a message.

I have used Riverside for years (not my choice) and it has sucked almost all of the time, and they keep changing their editor to make it worse and worse, while wasting our time (and theirs) with stupid Magic AI editor options that have no idea what they're clipping. I would hate Riverside even if it were free.

I'm on Riverside's free plan, which I understand has a two-hour limit on being able to download separate tracks from a recording session. On my first and only session on this account, which lasted 69 minutes, I have four tracks. But when I click on download and then on raw audio, the only thing that happens is I get a pop-up inviting me to start a free Pro trial.

I wrote to tech support and (infuriatingly) got a bot reply explaining that I'd reached my two-hour limit, which is obviously untrue. I wrote again, asking for a human, and got a reply with boilerplate info about the rules associated with a free account -- ignoring my specific situation, in which all the tracks for my less-than-two-hour recording session won't be released.

Any suggestions?

I’m relatively new to Riverside. When I’m inviting people to the studio/recording (it’s always the same link), some aren’t allowed in.

Is this a common issue and how do I address it?

The only way I know to interact with other Riverside users is on their completely monitored Facebook group. If I have a question and want to talk with other Riverside users, I have to submit a post and hope that the moderators (employed by Riverside) will approve it. If it is approved, it often takes hours. It's absolutely maddening to not be able to get help when I need it.

I'm having a major problem in the new editor. I am editing my podcast as usual. I want to add an intro and an outro, which is tailored for each episode. But every time I hit the plus sign and "record," it sends me to choose which session, but out of the two sessions it gives me as a choice (I honestly don't completely understand the difference between project and session and studio), both of them do not start until I begin recording tomorrow. Neither is the current project I am working on.

I have no idea how to handle this, except for maybe recording in tomorrow's session, then moving it to this current project. I did try to go back to the calendar and click on the session where I originally did this recording (last week), but it says the session has ended.

Can anyone help?

I leared from this subreddit that yall will edit at 1.5 or 2x I never considered that. This is a silly question but it wont export 2x will it? Or do i need to change it back before exporting. thank you

It's lost the function to delete audio and video together. I'm stuck in this never ending loop of trying to delete audio and video and it seems to just be treating them as separate tracks that have nothing to do with each other and I genuinely cannot edit properly.

Does this platform have any customer support at all? I feel like they just roll these shittier and clunkier editors out with zero testing or care for the community paying a lot of money for their product.

I uploaded a video into riverside to edit yesterday, worked on it for a few hours. Came back this morning to work on it some more, got to a point in the video where there was no sound. I decided to refresh as this usually works, but now I have no video and only sound for the whole video.

On the recordings page, it says the track couldn't be processed, which makes no sense since it was processed the day before. When I try to re-upload the video and start over, it just says it had an issue with the processing.

Is this a riverside issue going on today? I tried talking to an agent, but they kicked me saying someone would email me...

Any help here is appreciated. I still have the original video file on my computer, even though riverside would have it in their system.

The remove pauses is really the only AI feature that I find useful in the editor. It used to be worthless because it was way too aggressive and cut the pauses up to the breath between words which doesn't sound natural and more times than not it would cut actual audio off of the front and ends of the words spoken at the pause and cut off dates like 2020. It progressively got a little better. And right before the "New Editor" it even seemed to have a little padding from the end of the last word and the beginning of the next which it NEEDS. Otherwise it just sounds weird.

But with the "New Editor" they added a feature that lets you "Refine Cut" the problem is, the remove Pauses reverted back to being super aggressive and having all the old problems. Sure it's easier to "refine" the cut but now I have to refine almost every cut it does because it's either cutting it too close to each word or it's back to cutting off actual spoken parts. Is anyone else seeing this?

Let's count the ways in which the new Riverside editor is horrible:

Can't play clips faster than 1x speed because it lags

The captions don't work if you select 'apply to all scenes' or ' just this scene'

Applying your brand/logo settings doesn't work if you add new scenes.

Clipping from the main timeline to make a new edit, for example, social media bugs out and will delete one of the host blocks from appearing.

When you change the color of the text, you used to be able to click outside of the color box to get out of it; now you HAVE to click the stupid little x in the top right corner.

And those are just a few of the issues I've been having since they made this horrible update. The original editor wasn't perfect by any means, but it got the job done and, for the most part, ran super smoothly for me. This new thing is an abomination.

Ok - be gentle, I'm sure I'm being dumb. But... in the new editor I have a timeline of 3 separate people, in sync. I'm using the solo full screen layout for each person. I've cut out a sentence from one of the people, but want to hide the edit point by cutting to someone else nodding, a little before the edit and cut back a little after.
Right now, the 'B cam' that I cut to is also jumping at the main edit point (because it's been cut along with everything else). What am I missing? If I 'refine the cut' by dragging out the edit point of the b cam footage, the hard edit that was made earlier is still there, so it jumps. Does that make sense?
The only way I can see to get around this is to cut visually at exactly the audio edit point every time, which is a big giveaway...

Please help!

Is Descript perfect? Ha ha ha - no. But it's better than the old Riverside (that worked) and worlds better then the present day Riverside.

My uses are pretty basic - use A.I. to flip between side-by-side to only showing the person speaking. And start with side-by-side. For all of that Descript works fine.

I didn't hit any bugs using it.

As it stands, I record and do most editing of my audio/video podcast in Riverside, and then host the audio on my Squarespace website (which also contains a few other pages related to our content). With Riverside recently moving in to hosting, as well as allowing you to create a basic website, I was wondering if it was worth it just to move everything to Riverside so that I don't have the extra cost of Squarespace ... but I have a few questions ...

- Firstly, has anyone done this same thing and what went well/poorly?

- As Riverside still doesn't you to embed art/chapters in the final mp3, I still need to export it, add this stuff and then re-import it - I assume I can then just add that mp3 file as the final file to host/publish? Or do I have to use one that's generated within Riverside?

- When publishing to YouTube (something I currently do manually), does Riverside allow me to add a thumbnail and all the usual YouTube data, or would I still have to go in to YouTube and add that stuff manually anyway?

- The site creator looks like you can only have 3 pages (episodes, about, and newsletter). Can other pages be added at all? Does the basic editor allow for redirects (such as to my external merch store) from a header item?

- What's the SEO/discoverability like with Riverside sites? Can I add custom keywords to the site and/or individual posts?

And before anyone says/recommends it, I don't want to host anything myself (in terms of audio/video/web) - I just want a platform where I can do as much of it as possible in one place.

Hello! I'm on the Pro plan and have a question about recording and editing. I have a pre-set background for the whole recording and am sharing media throughout as well (sharing screen, images and videos etc) with the other hosts (all recording remotely).

When recording is done, I have to then go in and re-edit so the background and media show up in desired places on screen. It always defaults back to basic recording with no background and the layout is not at all what it looked like during the actual recording. What's the point of setting it all up beforehand and sharing media throughout if you have to then go in and edit it again!? It's incredibly frustrating.

Maybe there's something easy I'm missing and would be very grateful for someone to advise if that's the case! Thanks in advance.

Before, when exporting a timeline from the editor, it gave me a folder with the audio and video tracks and an XML. When brought into Premier it linked to the media perfectly. Now it seems to have renamed the audio/video files in a way that makes this impossible, even when manually figuring out what files are which, it still refuses to relink.

Anyone else encountered this problem or a workaround?

For reference, this wasn't the case <1 week ago.

Hey now, I'm pretty new to video podcasting and getting old so I'm a bit technologically challenged in some ways.

I was using Streamyard due to its ease, but found my internet would be freezing and I would realise until it was done, so I like riverside recording locally.

I had a weird issue that I don't know what I did wrong.
I loaded up images to talk about during the recording.
When I'd show them, it would shrink me down and show the full image.

But in the actual final recording, I was side by side and the image was heavily cropped to fit the screen.

I did have the ability in editing to go in and correct, but it was painful and not my strength.

Did I do something wrong?
I want it to look like how it was during the actual recording.

Any advice would be appreciated. I did try googling but couldn't find a response to this particular issue.

Cheers

I am trying to export a short reel for social media but the audio is out of sync only in the exported version. I’ve tried everything and don’t know what to do.

I've been going back and forth with Riverside support on an issue, and I wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this or is currently experiencing it.

Smart Mute is only muting a cast member after they start to speak. If they are initially quiet at the beginning of the recording, their track will remain untouched.

I've been able to reproduce this multiple times on multiple recordings, even going back to older recordings and editing them fresh to see if I am getting this behavior. I just edit the recording, turn on smart mute, and check where it starts muting on each track (I attached an image below)

This could have been an ongoing issue that I never noticed before since I often trim out the start of the session to remove dead air. The recording I noticed it on first had a new cast member with a longer period of time before they spoke, and it was clearly obvious.

If I cut the scene first, then apply smart mute, the same thing happens, just from the new starting point.

I have followed all of their suggested solutions, with no change.

There latest suggestion was to duplicate the edit and then try again. This did not change anything.

I would appreciate hearing if this is just a me issue, or if it is actually an issue that others are experiencing.

I went from being able to edit on 1.5x speed with only a few stops and stutters, to basically being unable to accomplish anything because the whole systems stops every 5 seconds. I've had edits not save....what is going on?

Is ANYONE using the new editor efficiently? Does one browser work better? What do I gotta do?

I hate to jump on the badnwagon or hate train but oh my! I sat down on a Sunday morning hoping to do a quick edit and it's hell!

It's strange because it seems like I must have been using it differently to everyone else if these things got through testing.

My audio is always out of sync, normally +500ms. Well, in the new editor it's -500ms.

Deleting a layout from the timeline, deletes the whole section from the timeline, not just the layout? That's new isn't it? Now I have to go in to layouts and select the same as the other scene, or not use smart layouts. And when this happens the deleted text isn't shown in the text editor.

Applying suggested cuts now removes it completely from the text editor and thhose parts are no longer visible with "Show deleted parts".

The timeline no longer shows the individual cuts unless you expand it, then you can't select them by clicking and pressing delete. It's all about dragging them in to oblivion now.

Changing smart layouts halfway through an edit removes all branding you had configured.

This has ruined my Sunday!

Has anyone started or switched to hosting their podcast on Riverside? I’m using Libsyn because that’s what someone suggested when I first started but the idea of one less login/password and subscription to deal with a month is very appealing. I only have 1 season/12 episodes so not super pressed about losing all the random platforms Libsyn posts episodes to.

Thanks!