Helping an Industry Leader Design & Build For The New Age of Podcast Recording

The Challenge:

Replace a complicated and manual podcast recording process with a beautiful, collaborative audio recording product.

The Outcome:

Podfly Studio, a web application for podcast hosts that simplifies guest coordination, file storage, and high-fidelity audio recording.

The Crew:

• Nick Fogle – Senior Full Stack Engineer with a background building SaaS web applications including digital audio applications in the podcast industry.
• Jay McAliley – Senior Full Stack Engineer with a background in web and mobile experience ranging from audio signal processing algorithms used by Shazam, to data visualization software used by Deloitte, McKinsey, AT&T, and Liberty Mutual.
• Carter Wooten – Full stack engineer with specialization in client-side web application development.

Since the original iPod came out in 2001, the podcast industry has come a long way.

As of 2017, an estimated 67 million Americans listen to podcasts monthly (Edison Research). While the space still has room to innovate around discovery, monetization, and distribution, we were surprised that so few were innovating on the podcast recording process. Then we met Podfly.

About Podfly

Podfly Productions, LLC is a boutique podcast production company that helps take the time and headache out of creating your own podcast. Their services cover everything required to produce high-quality podcasts and distribute them to the world. Boasting an impressive client list, Podfly has worked with some of the finest broadcasting and media organizations, including CNN, NPR, and CBS Interactive.

The Challenge

Most listeners are aware how difficult it is to produce an extremely high-quality podcast. Capturing quality audio, managing audio files, and collaborating as a recording team takes time, expertise, and effort.

Podfly’s production team has recorded and released countless episodes for their clients. All of these podcasts were created using existing technologies and a host of manual processes that covered session scheduling, file storage, and host communication.

With a full schedule and growing demand from new customers, Podfly needed to find a better solution & workflow capturing high-quality audio.

Introducing Podfly Studio

Acting as an independent team of designers & developers, the Fount Team worked closely with Podfly’s Founders to design, architect, and build a solution that streamlined and optimized the podcast recording process.

Working closely with the Podfly Team helped us understand the intricacies of podcasting recording and the importance that audio quality, user experience, and design would play into the finished product.

We were able to put together a ship for this project that consisted of:

• An engineer that had built audio solutions for Shazaam
• An engineer that ran a startup focused on audio messaging
• A designer with experience in both audio animations & UX design

Audio Quality or Bust

Host & guest collaboration was an important requirement to consider before designing a solution. The Podfly Team knew that guests needed to easily join collaborative sessions via the web. The first challenge was ensuring that a certain level of audio quality could be obtained during web sessions.

Integrating a server side audio recording platform allowed us to configure the web application to record audio in high fidelity from multiple participants. The storing of audio was just as important as the capturing. Because podcast files could be quite large (some episodes are well over an hour) and the recording session could be paused, we designed a storage process that spliced the audio into short multi-second intervals and stores them for quick retrieval.

Designing for Collaboration

While the primary user of the product would be podcast hosts, the podcast guest user experience needs to be prioritized. Leveraging back-end scheduling an email services, functionality was built so podcasters can invite guests during the podcast session creation process and an email is automatically sent for confirmation.

The podcast guest can then add the session to their calendar and join the session via a dedicated URL when the session opens.

A Staple Animation

Last but not least, our design team worked hard to come up with a signature design asset that would help Podfly stand apart from the industry. The result was an audio waveform animation which is featured on the home screen of the application:

If you are a podcaster or audio producer looking for tools to streamline your recording process, visit podfly.io to learn more.

To learn more about Fount, visit our homepage or click to learn about our team, our work, or our services.