Clubdeck Review: The Clubhouse App To Make Social Audio Remarkably Easy With Cody Hanify

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish Feed your Brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Feed you'd Brand on behalf of Tracy Hazard and Tom Hazard. My name is Cody Hanafi, your special guest host today. I work with Pott A Ties internally, so I've known Tracy and Tom here for a couple years now. I've been working for them for a little over six months now too, and I've been very excited to be a part of this Potatoes team and bring different perspectives here. Basically what you're going to be seeing from me here is probably come on multiple times here and talk about multiple different topics. I'm pretty knowledgeable on some tech fields here and there. I've done lots of music development here, so you'll probably see me come on a lot and talk about new tech things included with today's topic, which I'll go over here in a second as well too. So you're probably going to be hearing and seeing lots of new faces on Feed your Brand as it's our goal to get some of the team involved with new topics. Keep it fresh for you and the last time that we had a guest, Melissa and Tracy went over some terms that kind of get misconstrued with podcasters and they wanted to clarify a couple of things for you. So it sounds like that might be a repeated segment as well too. So I'm looking forward to the next glossary episode with both of them. But I I just want to take some time real fast to thank the Feed you'd brand and the Potitize family for the opportunity. I'm excited to be a part of this and happy to get the team involved in diversifying our knowledge with multiple perspectives within the company, but also within the podcasting community, because that's what this is all about.

So without further ado, let's get to today's topic. Okay, today what I'm going to be talking about and touching on is Club Deck. It's a Club Deck review, the Clubhouse app to make social audio remarkably easy. That's the title of the episode today. So I'm here to introduce you to a new computer app is essentially what I'm here to do. You can maximize your Clubhouse experience, which I think is pretty cool. We all know about Clubhouse a little bit. But I'm just going to touch upon just in case some of us are new to Clubhouse or I just need to introduce this to the community and get this conversation through this community social engagement app. Right? That's essentially what Clubhouse is. So Clubhouse is an audio based social media app. The company describes itself as a new type of social product based on a voice that allows people everywhere to talk, tell stories, develop ideas, deepen friendships and meet interesting new people around the world. Basically you can jump in and out of different chats or different subjects in something akin to a live free flowing type of podcast. Right? You can simply listen or choose to throw in your own thoughts. In theory, it's supposed to be somewhat of like a cocktail party or a social event or a club house. Thanks for that pun. But when you see it in practice though, it comes across more of some mixture of like LinkedIn, a panel discussion or like a professional conference is usually what I typically have noticed going into these different chat rooms recently. Now, Vogue described Clubhouse's experience as a quote unquote dizzying bringing together of live podcast style conversations. They go on to say the social media app mimics real life interactions as well too. I think that's a great timing for us to engage with social connection, especially over the last couple of years. If we're inventing new ways to get across the multiple different platforms, might as well take advantage of all of them, right? We can drop the link to the Vogue catalog for you too as well. I'll make sure that that happens. All right, so now you might be asking yourself why Clubhouse people still use Clubhouse. Like why should I use Vogue Clubhouse? Right? Well, Clubhouse is, like I said, a great way to build and flush out ways to create and increase your Listener engagement. You can check out the feed you'd brand episode titled Listener Effective ways to foster audience participation and comments. In that episode, Tracy kind of shares experiences within the Clubhouse app. So I would definitely check that out to get Tracy's perspective, especially early on when we were going through with that. Awesome. So in that episode, like I said, Tracy just explains her experience with the Clubhouse app. Now some say Clubhouse's biggest weakness is that to use it, you have to use your mobile phone device, right? You can only use your phone with this. Like this causes issues, right? Not being able to multitask on your phone while staying in the groups, creating this live engagement type of opportunity for people that are in these group chats is tough, especially when you're only operating off of a mobile device. But I think the biggest drawback here with Clubhouse, because it's only existing on a mobile device, is that you don't have a high quality microphone that you've been able to plug into this device. And headphones really aren't that well too. They don't just, they don't pick up good enough quality. And so when you want to create some great useful conversations and same them and stream this type of audio, especially when you're going into these group chats, you want to have the best audio quality possible. And keeping in mind when you're utilizing this, not everyone is also going to be situated with this type of situation too. Some people are tuning in through their mobile app, some people are tuning in through ho. But this is my turn to kind of share with all of our productized community of what Club Deck is and being able to utilize it at its fullest capabilities. Right now we have a beautiful way to work around all the Clubhouse issues. Club Deck. So Club Deck is a third party desktop app and the creators of the desktop app call it Superpowers for Content Creators on Clubhouse. So this isn't something that was made by Clubhouse. This is a third party app that you install into your desktop. Awesome. So with Clubhouse. I'm sorry, with Club Deck. See, I'm getting that misconstrued already and maybe we need to make those some glossary terms. But anyways, with Club Deck you can pretty much do the same thing you would do on the smartphone app with additional key features with a totally different user experience, especially if you're a content creator. I would take a listen because this is really cool stuff here. Right. Like I said earlier, you could use a professional microphone with or a sound card to maximize your audio quality. You can even reroute the audio through software like loopback or backhole. The possibilities with that are endless. It's really cool. You can turn it into a music mode too. Now for people that understand that you can operate now at 48 between 48 kilohertz and 128 kilobits per second, there's no special cables required. You can just turn that music mode on within the app. If some people understand that, I'll probably go through it a little bit later here too to kind of show you the interface. But what's really cool too is like the biggest thing with Club Deck and Clubhouses is user engagement or engaging with an audience. Right. This is the best way to Kind of practice that. So it's really cool. What Club Deck offers here is they have custom sounds and jingles that you can utilize through the apps interface or you can download directly from. You can rip things directly from YouTube while you guys are in this app, while you guys are going through whatever topic that we're talking about in Club Deck and you can take it directly from there and throw it in and it saves in the audio. It's seamless. It's really awesome actually. You can apply real time audio effects like different voice changeovers. You can throw a reverb on your voice and this is all through Club Deck now with Clubhouse too is you can record these rooms now and you can restream it to all of the different social media networks, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, all of those. And you can manage all of that within the Club Deck act that way. There's just one interface that you're utilizing all of the capabilities here. And for the viewers out there, I'll probably share my screen and go through a couple of those and kind of engage the listeners as much as I possibly can with that. Right. So what I definitely highly recommend too is you checking out that you can manage a chat room like you've done it your whole life. It's seamless. You can set up a chat room within there, develop your topics and pick the speakers. It's really cool. Interface with the Clubhouse. Right? Interface. Excuse me. So we record highlights of your room in real time as well too. So let's say we're talking and we want to get like a discussion going and there's a little bit of an audiogram that you kind of want to kind of cut, save and upload to let's say YouTube or something like that. Right. You can definitely get that set up. So they send you little short. You can cut little short clips with little audiogram on it of whatever section you want to take out of that conversation and you can send it anywhere it saves directly to your computer. You can set up a back channel to coordinate with live co moderators. And I'll go into with why a moderator might be very smart to have for you while you're utilizing this interface. Cause there's a couple of little workarounds here.

Cool thing about Club Deck is you can find key people to invite on stage by browsing your audience bios with seamless ease. It's so simple to be able to search someone, add them in, send them an invite. They actually implemented shortcuts to keyboard shortcuts. Goodness gracious. Wow. Maybe I need to do some water here in a second because I haven't spoken so long in such a long time. I love this experience. But anyways, what you can do here is utilize and navigate Clubhouse like a boss with these shortcuts. And you can go through the Club Deck app. You just download it and it'll show you all of those. That way you can just get through your room and get through the really cool attachments that I was talking about with ease. And pretty seamlessly as well too. You can search rooms, users, clubs, you can pin searches, you can pin links to the top of your room. Just copy from the browser, import it in. You can actually have a live transcript going along with your room too. With Otter AI integration as well, you can manage your Clubhouse replays with clicks. Pick your favorite light darker. You know, I know how some people like to pick different themes as well too. You can pick the darker theme, the lighter theme. I'm a lighter theme type of person. That's just my personality. I'm sure there's different types of different people out there that have different means for that anyways, but like I said, let's take some time here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen here for the viewers and we're going to go through a couple things that I was talking about. That way you can kind of see what the device or the software looks like here and I'm going to try to paint the picture as well as I can for the listeners. So let's get that going. Cool. Alrighty. So right here you should be seeing our screen right here. So this is Club Deck, right? I've downloaded it to my app and it's just right here. Basically what you can do is you can just type in a link, you can start a room here to just search any type of topic right here that you want to search on. You can start a room just like you would use Clubhouse normally on your Clubhouse app. It's very seamless, right? Start your room. Boom. I kind of already got one set up. That way I can show and navigate through a couple of these really cool add ons that you can utilize through this app. Right? So I titled this chat or this room Poditized coaching call test. I don't have. I have it private. That way we can kind of just go through some of the settings and see what we got here. So controls are very simple right here. So you can mute and unmute yourself at any time right here and you can mute Everyone with a whole button right there too. Different shortcuts for doing that as well too. You can ping different people. So if you want to type in someone and ping them and get them involved with this room as well too, you can get that going. And then here's the most important part too, especially for your audio situation, your microphone situation is you want to be able to set your settings. If you don't know how to do that, just go into the audio settings right here. And I would do the headphones. And then whatever microphone you're using right there, it might give a little bit of feedback because I did that beer, because I have it muted. There it goes. Maybe I'm just hearing that. But anyways, so you can set it to different type of things. And you can. Like I said, here's that music mode that I was talking about. It kind of makes sure that your audio quality is dependent on the audio quality that acceptable for you and your show. Right? What's really cool here is there's different things you can do here as well. Let me see if we can get you all to hear that. These little audio effects, like they have different claps here. If you guys are hearing that comedy, it's like people laughing and such. And then just like a little ding. There's like different here. You can load in your own custom sounds. So let's say you have any sounds that you like utilizing with your show. You can make sure that that's going right there. You can also rip that effect from YouTube as well too. It's a legal way for you to just go to YouTube, export an audio effect and put it in and be able to control the volume right here as well too. It's really cool stuff actually. And close that up. So that was your audio effects. Now here's some vocal effects too. So this was actually kind of cool. You can make you sound very different. Throwing different type of reverb on here as well to make it a little bit more fun. Now what's really cool is you can record the room. So you can just start recording and at any time you wanted to. And you can kind of stream that recording right here too. Let's say you wanted to stream live. Whatever we got going on right now, what it'll do is you can stream it to YouTube. You can put in the URL here, utilize the stream key that it's utilized with the YouTube interface as well too. And then what it'll do right here is it'll show you today's custom little audiogram with Waveform files kind of seamlessly going over it as well too. And you get to just start streaming live on YouTube as well too. So it's actually really, really cool. You can clip the audios here too. So I. E. When I'm, you know, actually recording and getting things going, you'll be able to clip the audio, save it and be able to share it with anyone. It downloads everything easily. So to operate your profile, you can go to your profile right here and you can change your status while you're doing anything within this actual channel as well too. Now, a couple different other things here too that we can go through, but what I think that you guys should really check out, especially if you're going to start utilizing this, is making sure you know how to utilize the back channel right. And so you can start a chat with anyone here. My main recommendation for you is definitely having a moderator here on to support you with all of these as well too. That way you can kind of chat with someone in real time without it being actually in the discussion about any technical issues that are going on. Because like we all know Clubhouse isn't perfect and sometimes more than one person can be talking at the same time or the audio quality just isn't as well as you would like it. So this is something you would want to like pre plan out, start a champ with someone and you can provide the private back channel that this literally the best way to is to have an admin set up a back channel. Fill in with the dead space while you fill the room. Just keep talking to people, you know, fill in all that dead space when you're trying to get everyone in that way that they can do sound checks on everyone they're listening and making sure that the audio quality before set your room to public or you want to start recording because sometimes when the audio comes out of it, the feedback or the recording it was blown out or it sounding like it's all muffled because no one was really there to take a look at the audio quality while you guys were on. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen here because I basically went through everything there on the interface that I wanted to go through today.

It's very important to have like a moderator on with that back channel. That way you can kind of go back and forth and talking about the different audio quality because like I said, when you take it out, sometimes it'll be muffled and you're not going to know until afterwards. So being able to make sure that you get that set up ahead of time will definitely help out your audio quality and help all that out in advance. Now scheduling in advance, Club Deck will allow you to duplicate and schedule events out. So reoccurring different type of chats and such, you can use that in Club Deck as well as Clubhouse as well too. So definitely getting to know the interface as much as you can is something I definitely highly recommend. I haven't utilized Clubhouse too much or Club Deck as much like crazy. I'm not a professional in it, but I was able to talk to a couple people here recently. Our client Christina Belizey if you sorry Karina Belize if you get in contact with her, she considers herself a pro in Club Deck as well too. So if you have any other major questions involving tech that you can plug in with that as well too, I definitely highly recommend hitting her up or listening to her show to care more be better. It's a fantastic show, should definitely get to look at that. But that's basically all I had today to go over with Club Deck. It's a great way, like I said, to use as an interface for Clubhouse, being able to multi manage multiple different things. You can have your phone free to do everything. Setting up the back channel, setting up different kind of audio settings and creating that audio engagement and listener engagement is kind of just essential for being a host that people want to keep coming back to, right? The more you're engaging with your audience, the more special they're going to feel and the more that they're going to keep coming back as well too. So that is all I had to share with Club Deck today. I wanted to say thank you again to Tom and Tracy Hazard for letting me be a part of this episode and being able to showcase new technology for you in the podcasting community. And we hope that you have a great, fantastic week. And I can't wait to talk to all of you again soon. Like I said, this is Cody Hanafi with Feed you'd brand and we hope you have a great day. Thanks again.

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