Riverside Review: Studio-Quality Podcasts From Anywhere

Recording a remote podcast or interview over a standard video call means living with whatever your weakest guest’s internet connection can handle. Riverside (formerly known as Riverside.fm) solves that problem at the source: every participant’s audio and video record locally, in full quality, directly on their own device, then sync to the cloud once the session ends — so a shaky connection never shows up in the final file.

On top of that local-recording foundation, Riverside layers a genuinely capable AI editing suite: Magic Clips turns a long conversation into short, caption-ready highlight clips, and a text-based editor lets you cut a video by deleting words from its transcript. A free plan with no time limit on single-track calls makes it easy to try the whole workflow before paying anything.

Who is Riverside?

Riverside is a browser-based recording and editing platform built specifically for remote podcasting and video interviews, positioned as an alternative to recording over Zoom or Skype and editing the result separately. Rather than asking creators to stitch together a recording app, a transcription tool and a video editor, Riverside bundles capture, AI editing, hosting and publishing into one workflow.

Also worth a look: Buzzsprout Review: The Easiest Way to Launch a Podcast and Descript Review: Video Editing Made as Easy as Editing Text.

The platform has built up a notably broad customer base for a tool in this category, with organizations including Spotify, Microsoft, The New York Times, TED and HubSpot using it alongside individual creators such as Ali Abdaal and Colin & Samir. That mix of enterprise media teams and solo YouTubers shapes a feature set that works equally well for a two-person interview show and a company’s internal video program.

Studios are organized per show inside the platform, so a producer running multiple podcasts or webinar series can keep guests, branding and recording settings separate without juggling multiple accounts.

What Riverside does best

Local, uncompressed recording

Audio records at up to 48kHz and video at up to 4K, captured locally on each guest’s device rather than streamed live, so recording quality never degrades to match a weak connection — and nothing is lost if someone briefly disconnects.

Magic Clips

Riverside’s AI scans a full-length recording and surfaces the strongest moments automatically, generating short vertical clips with captions ready to post, which removes a step that used to require manually scrubbing through an hour of footage.

Text-based AI editing

An AI editing agent and a transcript-based editor let you tighten a recording by cutting text rather than scrubbing a timeline, alongside automatic show notes, titles and descriptions generated from the conversation itself.

Built-in publishing and hosting

Finished episodes can go straight to podcast hosting, a creator website, and live streaming across multiple platforms simultaneously, which keeps a show’s entire pipeline — record, edit, publish, promote — inside one subscription.

Flexible recording formats

Beyond remote interviews, Riverside supports in-person multi-camera recording and a built-in teleprompter, useful for solo video or in-studio sessions as well as fully remote ones.

Products and pricing at a glance

Every paid tier builds on the same local-recording core, with higher plans adding more monthly recording hours plus publishing and streaming features.

What customers say

Riverside holds a strong average rating across independent software-review sites, and the praise is consistent: users highlight recording reliability on shaky connections as the single biggest reason they switched, alongside how much editing time Magic Clips and the AI editing agent save on a weekly show. The breadth of well-known media teams and individual creators using the platform is itself a signal of how it performs at very different scales of production, and the built-in hosting and publishing tools get specific credit for cutting out separate subscriptions many podcasters used to juggle.

Who Riverside is best for

Riverside is the strongest fit for podcasters and video creators who record remote interviews regularly and want recording, editing and publishing handled by one tool rather than three. Businesses producing webinars or multi-guest video content also get clear value from the higher tiers’ streaming and lead-capture features.

Solo creators who only ever record themselves, with no remote guests, may find a simpler single-track tool is enough — Riverside’s strongest advantages show up specifically in multi-person, remote recording scenarios.

Price and value

At $24 a month billed annually, the Pro plan already includes 4K recording, the AI editing agent and single-show podcast hosting, which covers most solo and small-team shows without needing to upgrade. Grow’s jump to $34 a month is worth it once live streaming, a second show or a creator website become part of the workflow. The free plan’s unlimited single-track recording is also a legitimately useful way to test audio and video quality before committing to a paid tier, and because every tier includes the same core recording engine, upgrading later is mostly a matter of needing more monthly hours rather than unlocking basic quality.

Verdict

Riverside solves the actual problem that makes remote recording frustrating — unreliable connections ruining a take — and then backs that up with AI editing tools that meaningfully cut post-production time, making it one of the more complete platforms available for remote podcasting and video interviews.