In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through SquadCast, now part of Descript, as a premium solution for remote podcast recording. He contrasts SquadCast’s local, high‑resolution audio‑video capture with Zoom’s cloud‑based, bandwidth‑limited recordings, highlighting the superior quality and isolated tracks that SquadCast provides. Shaun demonstrates how to schedule sessions, generate backstage links for live audience viewing, and configure recording formats (audio‑only, video, 4K mobile). He shows the iPhone/iPad beta app, walks through joining a session from a phone, and explains the upload process, quality checks, and download options (MP4, WAV, MP3). The video also covers the bundled pricing model (one subscription gives access to both SquadCast and Descript), and how to import recordings into Descript for editing, including tips on removing filler words without breaking audio‑video sync. Throughout, Shaun emphasizes the tool’s reliability, ease of use, and its role in his own tech stack and client work.
Chapters
Hey everyone, welcome to this video. It's been a while since we put out a video here on the channel, but I want to go over Squadcast. Now we've been doing a lot of work with Descript in the content that we're creating for ourselves and also with our clients and falling absolutely in love with Descript and what it can do to be able to record and do the titles and everything. And actually recording this video using Descript and the screen recording feature of it versus using Loom. Which I've been using for several years now. Several months ago, Descript has acquired Squadcast, so squadcast.fm, which you see here on the screen. And this is an amazing tool for being able to remotely record podcast interviews, both in audio and video formats. Now I've used several other competitor systems along the way, and you may say, hey, you know what, I use Zoom. And while that may work for you, that's perfect. For your application. Now, I just want to explain a bit of a difference between using a tool like Zoom or using a tool like SquadCast. With Zoom, you have to actually send your video and audio up to the Zoom servers, and that's where it's recorded. And if your internet connection is slow, your guests are slow, that recording will actually be pixelized because of the data transfer rates that are there. Now, when you use a tool like SquadCast, what it's actually doing is it's caching the video and the audio on the local computer. So on your computer, it's recording there. It's also uploading in the background as well, but you're getting that high-resolution video and audio that's there. So the difference is when you stop, it may take a minute or two for both videos, or, or, you know, if you got 4 guests, all 4 videos to upload to the actual SquadCast account. But that means that when you download it, you get the highest possible quality for that. It also isolates all the videos so you can export certain video clips that are just of your guest or of yourself. And you can edit those things in Descript or any other video recording and editing software that you have. So they've acquired it. And the other thing that I absolutely love is it's one price for both tools. So you sign up for SquadCast, you get Descript, or you sign up for Descript, you get SquadCast, right? And that's. That's really a great model for that. But we take a look here at some of the pricing options on the page. That's going to come up here. I mean, we're running the, the, I think we're running the creator or maybe the pro version. I don't know which one I'm in, but still, I mean, $12 or $24. It's in here. It's based on how many shows you're running. I think I'm running this one here. But it gets you access to Descript, which is very helpful. And I just want to show you what it's like in the backend of it. So we have our Content Amplification Podcast is what I use, as you see here, since I've signed up to record some of my client clips. But you can go and create a session right away in here, or you can view other sessions. You can either start it immediately or you can schedule that session. And this is what I love about this. So what I'm going to do here, I'm going to say sample recording. And I can pick the date and time in the future that I want to have, the time zone, recording format, video and audio, or just audio only. And they got this beta feature as of right now recording this to maximize the recording quality. Now I turn that in and it takes it above and beyond. So you get this stage link that's here and you can add in your guests or participants in here and it will actually send out the invite to them automatically through here. Now down here you have an option for what's called a backstage. And what that is, is if I create a backstage, it's going to give me another link., and this could be for viewers. So maybe you're doing, uh, like, let's say like a little, uh, workshop or thing or something like that where you have, you know, a guest speaker coming and you want to actually go ahead and have a link. So maybe you've got a key interview that you're doing for your podcast, and now you want to use this backstage link to promote on social so people can actually go and watch live in the backstage area of it, which is a really cool feature that I've not seen anywhere else. Now you don't have to add your participants in here. You can just go ahead and give your guests the link to get started. So I'm going to go ahead and click done in here. So there's my sample recording setup, right? This is ready to go. I can get the link anytime. So I'm going to go ahead and click start session. And what it's going to do is going to come in here. It's going to allow me to add in my name and pick my audio and video devices that are here for everything that's going on. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say, now I'm also recording this in Descript. So hopefully I got enough bandwidth for all this kind of stuff. We can also start a test recording. So I'm going to click connect. And now it's going to go into the actual recording side of it. So down below, we've got options to mute our microphone, turn off our camera, hit record to start recording. We can share our screen. So that's even more functional with any other podcast system. It's kind of like a Zoom feature to be able to do that. Or you can go ahead and take a squad shot or a screenshot of it. Now, when your guest joins, you'll see two kind of windows here. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back for a second and I'm going to copy that to my clipboard and see if I can actually— let's see if I can, uh, let's see here, share link. So we are going to copy the link to my clipboard now. I'm going to start now. I'm going to open up my phone and paste that into a browser. Hopefully it copied over. It should have. There it is. So I'm going to show you what this looks like when we connect. We don't get any feedback here. So we're going to say go. Now I just clicked it on on my phone and it's going to say, would you like SquadCast to access your microphone? So you can see that right there. So I'm going to click allow. And now I'm in the green room. So that's the experience. It's loading the camera on my phone. I'm going to say Shaun 2. Okay. Now Squadcast is in beta in iPhone and iPad version, it says. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to say join session. So let's just see if we get any feedback here. I think my microphone is, or my speakers are muted. So that shouldn't be too big of an issue. Let's turn the speakers down anyway. Okay. So I'm in here. Click on this. Oh, I got to join the session myself. There we go. Okay. So here we are. As you see, this is the phone on the right side. Oh, I'm going to turn my speakers down on the phone so we don't hear that. And here I am. So this is a great feature because the app was working pretty good on my phone. Everything is pretty clear. I can mute, take everything that you see here on the bottom on the mobile device. I don't know what you're going to see here. It's not really showing you much, but you see on the right side, but it's a great system. It allows you to do a lot. So you would hit record. So we're going to hit record right now and it starts recording, right? So now we're in the session, we're doing the whole thing. Now you don't get the screen picture in picture in the corner like you're seeing there. That's part of the Descript. Recording for the screen share that's here. And when you're done, you just hit stop. And what you're going to see here is it's doing a quality check over here. This here. And it's going to start to upload my video and audio. So there's the audio it's uploading from my phone. And once it gets to 100%, then everything is uploaded to the system. And we can start to download those video files. Now we're recording at 4K on the phone because the phone has a 4K iPhone camera. The webcam I have on the computer is only 1080p. So that's why that's saying that there. So this may take a few minutes for everything to upload, but, uh, that's how that works. I'm just going to lay the phone down here and we'll shut the camera off. Uh, so we don't have to see all that kind of stuff. So, um, I'm going to let that do its thing right there. But I'm going to go back over to the other tab and I'm just going to log in again in the other tab, just because I want to point out something here. And because Squadcast is owned and connected to Descript, this is what the functions will allow you to do. Here we go. So I'm going to go ahead and look at one of the other recordings that I did. And when you go to download, you've got different options in here. You can download all the MP4s, all the WAV files, or the MP3s. Now, if you're an audio guru, you know that the WAV files are going to be higher quality. You can zip them all, or you can go ahead and click the ones that you only want to download. Now, in addition to that, you can drop this down here and you can say in here that you want to add it to your workflow. You want to edit the session, you want to favorite the session, add to the calendar if it already exists as well. So there's a lot that you can do in these different panels that are in here. And then you can also drop this down. Let's see in here. So now we've got both of us. So myself and Michelle, I can listen to the audio. I can watch the video files here, right within the platforms. So because it's isolating all the video and audio, maybe there's just some clips you want to work on for your social content. Well, you can take yours, you can take your guests, and you can do that. You're not going to get stuck with what Zoom will give you, which is a lower quality video and also the videos together. And that also allows you, if there's, let's say, you know, something happening, a noise, or you had to cough, you can actually, because the audio is being recorded independently, you can edit that out later. So that's not a big issue. Now, if you're also using Descript, you know that you can remove some of the, the ums and ahs in your audio. Here's the thing that, that you want to make sure. If you process that on, let's say, your video clip, it's going to take the sync of the interview out because now you've shortened your video clip, but maybe you didn't shorten your guest's one the exact amount of time. So maybe they answer ahead of time or there's a delay. So be aware of that to only do your ums and ahs after you've done your main cutting and editing within the system. So check it out, Squadcast. Absolutely love it. Love how it's working. Haven't had any real technical issues with it, but it's something that is part of our tech stack that we use for ourself and with our clients. Check it out, squadcast.fm.
