Riverside vs. Audio Audit (comparison)

Riverside is where a large slice of podcasting now gets made. It’s the remote studio you open in a browser: your guests record locally in uncompressed quality, the AI cleans up and cuts the result, and the finished episode heads out the door — and when Spotify wanted recording and editing inside its own Spotify for Creators platform, it didn’t build them; it plugged in Riverside and retired its in-house tools. Audio Audit sits at the other end of the pipeline entirely: it reads the finished file, measures whether it’s fit to publish, fixes the specific things that aren’t, and keeps checking your feed after the episode ships.

Where the two touch is the clean-up. Riverside’s Magic Audio removes background noise and echo and balances your levels in one AI pass, and its export dialog can normalise loudness. Audio Audit, as of August 2026, fixes things too: with Enhancements it applies noise reduction, speech levelling, loudness normalisation and clean metadata, and then you re-run the report to prove the numbers actually moved. Analyse, fix, verify.

The short version: Riverside makes the episode, beautifully; Audio Audit tells you what the episode actually is.

This page was last fact-checked against riverside.com in September 2026.

Comparison Overview

File and Metadata Checks

Analysis and Detection

Enhancement and Editing

Monitoring and Reporting

Plans and Pricing

Recording: Riverside Wins, and It Isn’t Close

Let’s start with what Riverside is actually for, because it’s very good at it. Every participant in a Riverside session records locally — 24-bit, 48 kHz, uncompressed WAV, one track per person — so a guest’s terrible hotel Wi-Fi degrades the call, not the recording. The files upload progressively in small chunks while you’re still talking, which means a crash at minute 58 doesn’t cost you minutes 1 through 57. Video goes up to 4K, and since the Riverside 2.0 rebuild in mid-2026 the Mac app records in-person multicam sessions too.

Then the AI takes over. The editor is transcript-based — cut the text and the audio and video follow — with one-click filler-word removal, silence trimming to a pause length you choose, Magic Clips for social, AI show notes, and, since late 2025, a chat-based co-creator you can simply tell “remove all the silences and make me a 60-second reel”. This is the machine Spotify chose to put inside Spotify for Creators rather than keep building its own, and that decision tells you how far ahead of the pack Riverside’s production line is.

Audio Audit does none of this, and we have no plans to bluff at it. There is no recorder, no video, no editor, no clips. We detect filler words, long silences and restarted sentences, and mark them with timestamps so you know how much of a problem you have and where it is — but you cut them somewhere else. In Riverside, quite possibly.

Loudness: The House Number, and a Toggle You Can’t Always Reach

The standard loudness for podcasts is -16 LUFS, and our customers tell us it’s the number one thing they check their reports for.

Riverside handles loudness with one house rule, and it’s worth reading closely. The export dialog has a “Normalize Audio Levels” toggle, and Riverside’s docs say what it does: it normalises to the EBU R128 standard, -23 LUFS. Let’s be fair about the pedigree first — EBU R128 is a real standard, correctly implemented, and if you were delivering to European broadcast television it would be exactly right. But a podcast isn’t television. At -23 LUFS your episode leaves Riverside around seven decibels quieter than the -16 LUFS podcast convention, and noticeably quieter than the shows either side of yours in a listener’s app. There’s no way to choose a different number.

Then there’s the catch that earns this section its title: Riverside’s own documentation states that when Magic Audio is switched on, the Normalize Audio and Remove Background Noise export options become unavailable. The AI clean-up and the loudness pass are an either/or. Take the noise reduction and levelling, and you give up normalisation entirely; take the -23 LUFS, and the AI polish stays off. And in neither case does Riverside ever show you a measured loudness figure — before, after, or anywhere else.

Audio Audit treats these as separate, composable, measured steps, because that’s what they are. Noise reduction builds a profile from the quietest moments of your recording and subtracts it frequency by frequency, capped at 12 dB — below the point where spectral processing on speech starts to sound underwater. Speech levelling is a compressor whose threshold comes from your measured speech level. Volume normalisation ships with presets for podcast platforms (-16 LUFS), YouTube (-14 LUFS) and ACX audiobooks (-19 LUFS), all with true-peak-safe limiting and a custom option, built on the same ITU-R BS.1770 loudness model broadcast uses: measure the whole episode, apply one constant gain change, never touch how it breathes. Run any combination in a single pass — no either/or — and then re-run the report to see the integrated loudness land next to the true peak, in writing.

What Happens After You Export

Riverside sees you to a finished file, and on the right plan it will even host your show and push it to the platforms. What it doesn’t do is look at the file the way a podcast directory will. Nothing checks or writes your ID3 tags, your cover art, your chapters, your bit rate or your channel layout; nothing measures the noise floor or catches the swearing before your listeners do. And its analytics dashboard — genuinely useful for what it is — counts streams and countries, not audio quality.

Audio Audit picks up exactly there. It reads the file that exists and tells you whether it’s fit to publish: bit rate, sample rate, sample width, channel count, peak level, noise floor, loudness, swearing, restarted sentences, filler words, long silences, missing metadata, cover art that directories will reject. Where a check fails, the enhancement that would fix it comes pre-ticked on the report — and if metadata is the only thing you change, the audio isn’t re-encoded at all.

Then it keeps going. Point Audio Audit at your RSS feed — Riverside-hosted or otherwise — and it re-checks the file your host actually served, which isn’t always the file you uploaded: hosts re-encode, and a re-encode can shift your loudness and clip your peaks long after every tool in your production chain has finished and gone home. Reports arrive by email, scores build up across episodes, shows and team members, and the trend tells you whether your audio is quietly getting worse. Riverside’s job ends when the episode goes out; ours is only half done at that point.

Paying For It

Riverside is a subscription with a real free tier. As of September 2026 the free plan gives you two hours of separate-track recording a month at up to 720p with a watermark — enough to know whether you like the product. Pro is $29 a month (or $24 a month billed annually) and unlocks the things you’d actually want: 4K, no watermark, Magic Audio on export, filler and silence removal, unlimited transcription. Grow at $39 adds hosting for two shows, a creator website and social scheduling; Webinar at $99 and a custom-priced Business tier stack business features on top. Check riverside.com/pricing for today’s figures rather than trusting this paragraph in a year’s time.

That’s honest pricing for a production studio you open every week. What there isn’t is any way in sideways: no one-off purchase, no credit pack, no path for the podcaster who records four times a year and doesn’t want a rolling bill.

Audio Audit runs on credits, with free credits every month, monthly plans if your usage is steady, and one-off top-up packs valid for 12 months if it isn’t. Reports and enhancements draw on the same balance — a full clean-up costs about the same per minute as a full standard analysis — and you see the estimate before you commit. Current prices live on the pricing page rather than in this article, because comparison pages go stale and pricing pages don’t.

So Which One?

If you’re making the episode — recording remote guests, editing in the transcript, cutting clips for social, doing anything with video — use Riverside. It’s the best-resourced product in its category, it’s the one Spotify picked, and nothing in Audio Audit competes with a minute of it.

If you want to know whether the finished file is actually up to standard, with the measurements to back it up — a loudness target you chose rather than broadcast television’s, noise reduction that doesn’t cost you your normalisation, and the tags and artwork a directory expects — and then keep an eye on every episode you publish from here on, that’s Audio Audit.

And the chain is obvious: record and edit in Riverside, export, and run the file through Audio Audit before it goes live — normalise to -16 LUFS with the clean-up still applied, write the metadata Riverside doesn’t, and check the finished artefact against everything a directory cares about. Then point the feed monitor at your show and let it check what your listeners are really being served, every episode, from now on.

Want the full detail on what Audio Audit’s enhancements do? See the Enhancements announcement and the Enhancing Audio guide, or head to the Pricing page to see what a report or an enhancement costs for your episode length. Comparing other tools too? We’ve written the same honest breakdown for Alitu, Auphonic, Descript, Adobe Podcast Enhance and Cleanvoice.

Photos courtesy of Jack Anstey