Headroom Publisher is a tool designed to provide final and fine polishing to your podcast episodes with minimal effort on your part. Our goal is to create a tool where you can upload the audio of your show in any format and, with minimal actions, achieve a final result that is ready to publish.
Let’s take more details tour through the Headroom
How to Go From Raw Audio to Published Podcast in Minutes — With Headroom
Whether you’re an indie podcaster or a seasoned publisher, post-production can be a grind. Manually formatting metadata, generating show notes, converting audio, and organizing files… it all adds up. That’s why we built Headroom: Podcast Publisher — a native macOS app designed to automate and streamline your entire publishing workflow.
Let’s walk through how Headroom takes you from raw audio to a published, polished podcast in minutes — no technical skills required, no internet needed.
One-Click Audio Import with Podcast Templates
When you first launch Headroom, you’re greeted with a welcome screen that offers several options to start. The fastest way? Import your audio using a podcast template.
A template is more than a pre-filled form. It’s a shortcut to consistency and clarity:
- Automatically fills in your show’s metadata (title, author, publisher, etc.)
- Pulls in info from your RSS feed — and keeps it synced
- Links to your export preferences, like audio format and show notes layout
You can create as many templates as you need — one for each show, season, or format. Headroom lets you manage these templates from the settings, and even import/export them as JSON for team collaboration or backups.
Once imported, Headroom analyzes your audio, extracts chapters (if embedded), and prepares the file for transcription.
Instant Transcription — Right on Your Mac
Headroom uses an on-device Whisper model, which means your transcription happens locally, with no need for an internet connection. This makes the process:
- ⚡ Fast — transcribe an hour of audio in just a few minutes
- 🔒 Private — your audio never leaves your machine
- ✅ Reliable — even if you’re offline or on the go
Transcription starts automatically by default (you can toggle this in settings). If you’ve already downloaded the model, the process begins right after import.
Let the Headroom Assistant Do the Heavy Lifting
Once the transcript is ready, it unlocks the real magic: Headroom Assistant.
Think of it as your post-production co-pilot. It can instantly generate:
Episode Metadata
Based on your transcript, the Assistant proposes a title, description, and detailed show notes. You can prompt it to summarize the episode, make it more engaging, or even optimize for search engines. Need a punchier title? Just click “Make it sound like a headline.”
Smart Show Notes with Templates
You can expand your show notes with pre-written templates — like guest bios, sponsor blurbs, or standard episode outros. Headroom merges these seamlessly into your notes. Each template can be podcast-specific or universal.
Chapter Art & Episode Artwork
Add compelling artwork to the episode or even individual chapters. Use existing assets, or experiment with AI-generated visuals using Apples’s Image Playground with Apple Intelligence.
Automatic Chapter Splits
Let the Assistant identify chapter breaks and title each one. Chapters make your episodes easier to navigate on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and they’re great for SEO too.
Final Setup: Metadata, Format, and Export
Once everything’s filled in, it’s time to finalize your episode for export and publishing.
What Headroom Handles:
- ✅ Episode number and season (proposed from RSS)
- 🔊 Audio conversion to MP3 or M4A, with customizable bitrate and loudness normalization
- 🧾 Metadata tagging: title, artwork, description, and more
- 📄 Export of transcription in multiple formats (TXT, SRT, VTT, MD, HTML, JSON)
- 💾 Export of episode metadata and show notes (HTML, MD, TXT)
Everything can be exported locally or to a podcast host (integration coming soon). You can even save your current export settings as a new preset — or sync it with a podcast template for use in future episodes.
Publish with Confidence
With a built-in publishing checklist and clear status indicators, you’ll always know whether an episode is ready to go:
- Not Ready — missing title, description, or show notes
- Ready — all required fields complete
- Published — already live in the RSS feed
When your episode is done, Headroom helps you preview, export, and publish — all from one place. And when it’s live, Headroom saves all your project data in one structured folder, so nothing gets lost.
Final Thoughts: Podcast Production, Reimagined
Headroom is designed to eliminate friction, automate the boring stuff, and give you more time to focus on storytelling. Whether you publish once a week or once a day, our goal is simple:
Make podcast publishing as smooth and fast as recording it.
🚀 Features at a Glance:
🎙 Episode Preparation
- Import audio files from any recording or editing application
- Convert files into podcast-ready formats (MP3, MP4/AAC)
- Add metadata, including title, description, and show notes
- AI-powered Headroom Assistant generates descriptions, summaries, and structured show notes
✍️ Automated & Manual Transcription
- High-accuracy AI transcription for seamless editing
- Identify and edit timestamps for better accessibility
- Generate subtitles in multiple formats: SRT, VTT, TXT, JSON
- Remove filler words and redundant segments with a single click
🎛 Comprehensive Metadata & Chapter Management
- Set episode numbers, season numbers, and explicit content tags
- Automatically insert time codes into show notes
- Generate structured chapter markers with timestamps
- Organize episode metadata and embed ID3 tags
📤 Flexible Export & Publishing
- Export podcast-ready audio with bitrate, sample rate, loudness normalization settings
- Generate episode files in Markdown, HTML, JSON, TXT, RSS Snippet
- Export structured transcriptions for web, video, and captions
- One-click upload to your preferred podcast hosting service
🤖 AI-Powered Podcast Assistant
- Transcription-Based AI Generation: Create episode titles, descriptions, and show notes automatically
- Chapter Suggestions: AI-generated chapter markers for better episode navigation
- Engagement Optimization: Improve clarity, conciseness, and searchability of titles and descriptions
- Custom AI Prompts: Set personalized AI responses for enhanced automation
🖥 Intuitive macOS-Native Interface
- Welcome View for quick access to recent episodes and templates
- Episode Window with waveform visualization and playback controls
- Sidebar Navigation for seamless switching between metadata, chapters, transcription, and export
- Customizable Player Controls with forward/backward options
🛠 Additional Tools & Settings
- Episode Checklist & Publishing Status (Not Ready, Ready, Published)
- Service Management for selecting and managing podcast hosting platforms
