Riverside.fm Review

Notes: All my test recordings took place on August 24, 2021. 

If you can fix the timing issues, the quality is better than Zoom and Zencastr.

Pros: It looks and sounds pretty good, has some really cool features!
Cons: It starts at $9/month (if you pay monthly), there were syncing issues, and a few audio glitches

Season 2 of “Song Gimmick” was recorded with Riverside.fm:

Episode 1 (audio – video)
Episode 2 (audio – video)
Episode 3 (audio – video)
Episode 4 (audio – video)
Episode 5 (audio – video)
(note: this is heavily edited and normal effects applied to audio as I would normally apply for podcasting.)

https://riverside.fm

When you join a recording, it asks you if you have headphones on. I like this because then I assume it doesn’t do the cancelation that other software will do when two people talk. And in my tests, this was the case. I selected separate tracks for internet recordings and recorded at 44.1 khz.

This being said, in the first recording, timing was off. Cory’s audio started in sync with everyone else, but got off more and more to where he was answering questions before they were asked. I chatted with customer service and they fixed it somehow. There was still a little bit of an issue, but easier to fix on my end.

Occasionally when I was talking, there would be glitch in the audio. It would silence 1/4 of a second, which is noticable (I was able to fix it for the audio version, but left a few in the video version.

Also, Cory’s video was a little glitchy. Not sure if that is his webcam or the software.

The soundboard is really cool. When you click on “media” on the right, you can drag in theme songs, sound effects, or in my case, song clips that we were using. You can record the soundboard, but it is in mono so I ended up swapping out the clips with the original stereo clips.

Double check your recording settings to make sure you have the quality level, audio & video, etc…

There are options for livestreaming to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, LinkedIn and custom. I didn’t test this, but that is pretty cool.

It has a “Magic Editor” that will mix the audio and video together, but if the timing is off, it doesn’t fix that.

Overall, this is the best so far, I will update this as I edit the next 4 shows, but I’m hoping that Squadcast will be better!