This week: New Service: Audio Total Runtime See Details

New: Podcast Episode Assembly — Intro, Show, Outro, Ads. Done.

The coolest tool we’ve made: drop your intro, episode and outro into three boxes and get back one tightly-joined, podcast-ready file at your chosen bitrate. Add an advert and it’s inserted into a natural pause in the show — never mid-sentence. Just have your files ready, drop them in and our ST Processor will do the rest and give you your podcast ready to publish.

It exists for the thousands of podcasters who don’t want an editor or a workflow — just the episode assembled correctly, every week, with no dead air at the seams. No waiting for engineers to do this for you. All done instantly!

Your first episode is free; after that it’s per-episode small pocket change fee and Assembly is included at no cost inside Podcast Dialogue Mastering plans that are coming soon. So if you are looking for an editor to add your podcast intro and outro, now you don’t need someone to add your podcast intro and outro. You can do it here 24 hours a day, 365 days a year! 🎉

Assemble your episode →

New: Record Label Accounting — Royalty Splits Settled in Minutes

Quarter-end at an independent label has a ritual: the distributor statement arrives, and the spreadsheet marathon begins. Our Record Label Accounting service ends it — upload the sales sheet and every artist and remixer payout is calculated instantly against your saved split rules, per-mix remix deals included.

It is private by design: statements are processed in your browser and never stored — only your split rules are saved, so next quarter settles itself. Read the payout summary, export the pay-run, pay everyone right.

Your first statement is free with an account; the label plan covers unlimited statements at launch pricing, and a dedicated app is on the roadmap for subscribers.

Run your first statement free →

Royalty Splits: Where Label Spreadsheets Go Wrong

Every independent label knows the quarter-end ritual: the distributor statement lands, and someone opens the spreadsheet. A hundred lines of sales, dozens of tracks, each with its own deal — artist shares, remixer shares per mix, the label’s cut — and every cell a chance to underpay someone you like.

Why splits break spreadsheets

Split accounting isn’t hard arithmetic; it’s relentless arithmetic. The failure points are always the same: a remix carrying a different deal than its original, a formula dragged one row too far, a track whose split was renegotiated but whose sheet wasn’t. The result is disputes, or worse — quiet errors nobody catches.

Rules once, statements forever

Our Record Label Accounting tool inverts the work: set each track’s split rule once — including per-mix remixer shares — and every statement you upload afterwards settles itself. Drop in the distributor sheet, read the payout summary per artist and remixer, export the pay-run to a spreadsheet, done.

Private by design

A label’s revenue is nobody else’s business, so the calculation happens in your browser: sales statements are never uploaded to or stored on our systems — only your saved split rules. Your first statement is free to run; the label plan covers unlimited statements at launch pricing, with an app on the roadmap for subscribers.

Audiobook Proofing: Why It Takes Days, and How It Became Minutes

Proofing is the least glamorous stage of audiobook production and one of the most expensive in hours: someone sits with the manuscript and listens to the entire book in real time, marking every place the narration and the text disagree. An 18-hour book is, at minimum, 18 hours of concentration — usually more, because you stop, scrub back and note timestamps. Professional proof-listening is commonly priced around £12 per finished hour, so a 10-hour book runs in the region of £120 and takes days to schedule and complete.

What proofing actually catches

Strip away the mystique and nearly every proofing mark is one of three things:

  • Substitutions — the narrator read a different word than the manuscript (“mantel” for “mantelpiece”, “car” for “carriage”).
  • Omissions — a word, phrase or whole line skipped.
  • Insertions — a word added that isn’t in the text.

Each one needs a timestamp, the manuscript line, and a decision: is this a re-record, or is it fine? Then every accepted re-record has to be compiled into a pickup list for the narrator — chapter, time, reason, and the exact sentence to read again.

Problem solved

Our Advanced Audiobook Proofing tool transcribes your entire book  — your files are never handed to a third-party cloud service — and compares every word against your manuscript. The comparison is built for narration, not for text: numbers, roman numerals and pronunciation variants are matched by meaning, so “forty” read for “40” is never flagged. It was tuned on real audiobooks with a simple goal: flag what a human proofer would mark, and nothing else.

The part a machine should never do

The judgement. Every catch is presented as a card — the manuscript line against what was narrated, with the timestamp and a confidence score. You play the moment and decide: accept for re-record, or dismiss. Nothing goes on the pickup list on a machine’s say-so.

What you walk away with

Once you’ve reviewed the catches, the deliverables build themselves: a numbered pickup script in book order (chapter, time, reason, the full sentence for your narrator to re-read), a preview audio file with the original take of each pickup so the narrator can match tone and pace, and a downloadable report with timestamp and chapter in separate columns, ordered by book position, ready to edit from. A manual proofing booth is included alongside, for the marks only ears can make.

The economics

Advanced proofing is priced at £19 per audio-hour (minimum £39) — a 10-hour book is £190. Manual proof-listening at around £120 buys a single pass through the same book over several days; this is the whole book in minutes, with the pickup script, audio references and edit-ready report generated as part of the job, and the manual booth included alongside. The first 20 minutes of any book are proofed free, so you can watch it catch things on your own narration before paying anything.

Audiobook Loudness: Why Platforms Reject Quiet Files (and the Fix)

Loudness is the most common purely technical reason a finished audiobook gets bounced — and the most misunderstood. Your narration can be beautifully recorded, cleanly edited and still rejected, because distribution platforms don’t judge sound with ears: they measure it, file by file, against a delivery specification.

The spec, in plain English

The standard delivery loudness for audiobooks is −18 LUFS integrated with a true-peak ceiling of −3 dB. LUFS is a measure of perceived loudness over the whole file; true peak is the highest instantaneous level once the audio is reconstructed by a player. Together they say: the book should sit at a consistent, comfortable listening level, with enough headroom that nothing clips downstream. This sits inside ACX’s required range for typical narration, and it’s what publishers and platforms commonly specify on delivery sheets.

How books drift off spec

Almost never in one dramatic way. Chapters get exported across weeks of sessions at slightly different levels. A re-recorded chapter comes back hotter than the original ten. A whole book is simply mastered quiet — −24 LUFS narration is very common from home studios. Each file sounds fine on its own; measured against the spec, half the book fails, and listeners notice the seams between chapters even when reviewers don’t.

What correction looks like

Level correction is a solved, verifiable problem — as long as it stays level correction. Our Audiobook Loudness Correction tool does it for you on the spot, so you don’t need to wait. it measures every file, brings anything off-target to −18 LUFS with peaks under −3 dB, then re-measures its own output so you download verified numbers, not hope. Files already on target are returned byte-for-byte unchanged — no pointless re-encode, no quality tax on chapters that were already right.

The caveat nobody prints: noise comes up too

Turning a quiet recording up turns its room noise up with it. If your noise floor is borderline, correcting the loudness can push the hiss past a platform’s limit — that’s physics, not a software failing, and any tool that claims to fix loudness and noise in one automatic pass deserves suspicion. The honest workflow: measure first. Our free compliance report shows the noise floor of every file in your book before you spend anything, so you know whether you need level correction, or a quieter recording.

The economics

Correction is priced as the utility it is: £9 per audio-hour, minimum £15 — a 10-hour book is £90 — and the first 20 minutes of any book are corrected free so you can verify the result on your own narration first.