Top Collaborative Podcast Tools: Planning, Recording & Publishing

Whether you're starting a podcast or you're just looking for more tools to help you collaborate with your co-hosts and guests, there are lots of tools out there and many of them are free to help you get organized and share that information with others. We're gonna go over some tools for both planning and recording your show, as well as what to do after that, both in publishing, sharing and recordings and more. Before we jump in, don't forget to subscribe to the Riverside YouTube channel and hit that like button. One of the first things you'll need to do is actually plan for your episodes. Maybe you're doing research or sharing links, and there's several different tools for that.

All of these that I'm about to mention are actually completely free. Number one is Google Docs. It's a great way to collaborate. You're probably already familiar with it.You do need a Google account and your co-host and guests will need one in order to participate, but you can add links, you can highlight, you can add comments across the notes. Great way to collaborate if you and your co-host are in the Apple ecosystem, Apple Notes is actually a great way to collaborate as well. You can share notes with multiple people.

Everyone can edit the note and add links, and whether you're on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, when you hit the share button, you can share links directly to a specific note without ever actually having to open the application. It's really convenient and the links show up with a nice little preview as well. Now, another great tool is Notion, depending on how many team members and how much collaboration you'll be doing, you might need to pay for it, but it's an extremely powerful application.

Great for you to just organize your own personal projects and tasks, but also great for collaboration. Here in Notion, you can have many, many pages on boards, but here's just a simple board, and you'll see here I have the different weeks shows. Let's say I'm doing a weekly podcast and have the topics here listed in these boxes. Cool thing about Notion is you can just drag these between weeks if you wanna move one, and then each of these topics can actually be their own page where you can expand and put more information.

You can add images, you can add text links, bulleted lists, and you can even embed videos right here within a page. This way, if you wanna share videos with your guests and co-hosts, they can actually see everything right here in Notion. Again, notion is free, even if you're just collaborating with one or two people, and if you want to add guests and actually give them viewing access but not editing, then you'll have to upgrade to the $8 a month per user plan.

If you like that board idea and really wanna get into project management for your episodes, Trello is a great free tool where you can collaborate with others. It does have the same board view or you can look in list view, and when you have specific cards, you can expand those, add text links and videos, attachments, all of that. An Trello can be collaborative with your co-host and guests. We'll put links to all of the apps we're talking about in the video description.

In addition to planning with your co-hosts and guests, you'll also need to be able to schedule times, especially if you're interviewing people well, there's some great tools for that like Savvy Cal or Calendly, and the great thing is if you record with Riverside, Riverside actually has the same link to your studio to record regardless of how many times you use it. This way, every time you have a future guest for an interview, they'll have all the information they need to join the recording and and to your studio. We actually have a whole video explaining the studio link and using it with something like Calendly or Savvy Cal. You can check that video above or in the description.

One last free collaboration tool, and this is actually a feature in the brand new macOS Ventura operating system. If you and your co-host or guests are using macOS Ventura, you can have many tabs opening a Safari window, which we probably all have lots of tabs open. Go up to file and then you can create a new tab group.

A tab group will then save all the tabs you're viewing in in a group and it will stay there no matter what. Let's say these are all the links you need for the podcast. That's recording December 15th. I can now label that tab group and I can go back to Safari with no tabs and start from scratch for my normal browsing.

Then when I'm ready to record the episode or I want to add a tab to this show, I can go back and then all my tabs are still there and what's even cooler is you can hit this three dots next to the tab group name and you can share this tab group with others. When you share a tab group, you're actually collaborating with those people so they can add different tabs, see all the tabs you have added.
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It's a great way to collaborate both before your recording and during, so check out tab groups in Mac Os Ventura. Now, when it comes to recording your show, the best tool to record with remote guests is Riverside. Again, sending out your studio link to guests is super easy, and it's the same link every time, so you can choose guest copy link and send it out.

If you have a co-host that'll be joining you regularly, once they have that link, they'll be able to join every recording. You won't have to send them something new every time. Plus, your co-host and guests can join not only from a computer, but also our iPhone, iPad, or Android app. You can check out the video above for more information on that or in the description. Now, when you're recording a show in Riverside with your co-host and guest, there's actually a live chat.

That's a great way to give someone a heads up or let someone know where you wanna go next in the show. This way it'll cut down on editing in the future if you can actually plan as you go and really be seamless while you're recording live, much less editing in post-production. Now, once you're done recording, you might need to share those files with either an editor, producer, or your co-host and to share those audio files. If you're using another way to record. You can use a cloud service like Dropbox, even iCloud Drive with shared folders, but if you're recorded with Riverside, it makes it super easy to share those recordings.

When you go to a specific recording or episode, you'll see here all the video tracks and audio tracks. You can download the high quality video tracks and raw uncompressed audio, but here at the top where you see this little link icon, you can click that and it will copy a link to the recordings for this particular episode, and whoever you send that link to can actually access and download these recordings so they can edit the show.

Or if the episode doesn't require much editing, you can open the Riverside editor, choose a full-length recording, and Riverside will put together a side-by-side full-length video. You can actually set the in and out points and then export this video even up to 4k. You can normalize audio levels, remove background noise, and then export that video file for YouTube or your video podcast. So not only does Riverside make it easy to collaborate when you're recording and planning your show, but also when you're editing, producing, and ready to publish.

When you upgrade to a Riverside Teams account, you can even invite directors and admins to manage multiple studios and productions, and then they will have persistent access to all of your studios and recordings as you record in the future. Finally, when you need to collaborate on publishing your audio or video podcast, YouTube has a way where you can give permissions to other users to manage the channel, add videos and make edits here in the YouTube studio. You can go to the settings and then go to permissions and manage permissions, and there you can invite other users to participate in your channel.

If you're uploading an audio podcast, make sure to choose a host that actually allows you to invite users and give them permissions as well. Buzzsprout is a great option for this. When you go to settings, there's a team member's option and you can invite a new team member and even give them specific role access like editor or admin. Transistor, another great podcast host that has the team option. You can invite multiple members, admin, or just give someone access to analytics. Other hosts like Captivate FM and Fireside FM also have those multi-user features.

So those are some great ways to collaborate with your co-host and guests as you plan, record, produce, and publish your podcast. If you have any questions, leave a comment below this video. We'd love to help you there and subscribe to the Riverside Channel. We have lots of videos on the channel, like the best USB mics, how to use continuity camera with your iPhone, and how a livestream with Riverside. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you in the next video.