When a recording ends, most podcast workflows scatter. The audio is in one place, the transcript in another, your notes in a document, and the research you did during the conversation exists only in your memory. Reassembling all of it is the unglamorous middle stage between recording and publishing, and it is where a lot of episodes stall.
Session Viewer is the place where all of it stays together. This guide covers what is in it and the order to work through it.
Getting There
Two routes:
- Straight from a Studio session, using Open in Session Viewer after you save the take.
- Later, from your Recording History, which holds every session you have recorded.
Recording History is worth knowing about on its own. Every session persists there, so you can revisit an episode from months ago and still pull its transcript, audio, and assets.
The Three Tabs
Session Viewer is organized into Transcript, Episode Assets, and Downloads. Work through them in that order, because each one benefits from the work done in the previous one.
Tab 1: Transcript
The transcript is the timestamped record of what was said, and it is the source everything else is generated from.
Beside it sits the Agents panel, holding every card the live agents surfaced during the recording: research, fact-check verdicts, media, producer suggestions, prep desk pulls. Each card is anchored to the transcript line that triggered it.
This anchoring is the feature that makes the tab worth more than a plain transcript. When you scroll to a moment in the conversation, you see what the agents surfaced at that exact moment. The sources you cited are attached to the sentence where you cited them. The fact-check verdict sits next to the claim. The image reference sits next to the description.
Practically, this means the research does not have to be reconstructed. Most of the material you need for the episode page is already positioned where it belongs.
Rename Speakers Before Anything Else
This is the first thing to do in Session Viewer, and skipping it causes more downstream rework than any other omission.
Replace "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2" with real names. It takes seconds. Everything generated afterward inherits the names, so your show notes attribute quotes to people and your downloaded files are identifiable when they land in an editor.
Generate assets before renaming and you will be find-and-replacing through a description, a set of show notes, and a chapter list.
Host Markers
If you dropped markers during a Studio recording, they appear here on the same timebase as the transcript.
The three marker types:
- M, a generic marker
- C, "clip this"
- X, "edit out"
Your C markers are your clip shortlist. Your X markers are your first edit decisions. Because they share a timebase with the transcript, clicking one puts you at the right line rather than approximately near it.
Tab 2: Episode Assets
Four things generate from the transcript:
- Episode description, the short paragraph for podcast apps
- Show notes, the longer bulleted breakdown
- Chapter markers, timestamped sections
- Best moments, highlights with timestamps and quotes
Everything generated is editable in place and saves in Session Viewer.
Custom Instructions
The panel that determines output quality. Three separate style guides are saved per account and applied every time you generate:
- Episode description style
- Show notes style
- Chapter markers style
Write these specifically. "Write good show notes" produces generic bullets. "Six to ten bullets, each one a specific claim or story rather than a topic label, never open with 'In this episode'" produces something publishable.
If your show already has an established voice, use Investigate channel from link. Paste your show URL and Podmod researches the channel and drafts all three guides at once, based on your existing episodes. Edit from that rather than starting blank.
Set these once. Every future episode inherits them.
Best Moments as a Clip Pipeline
Best moments return with timestamps and quotes. The quotes are what make the list usable: you can read fifteen of them in half a minute and judge which are strong, which is impossible from timestamps alone.
Cross-reference against your C markers. Moments that appear on both lists, flagged live because they felt good and selected afterward because they read well, are your best clip candidates.
Tab 3: Downloads
Everything from the session, in files:
- Per-participant audio tracks, recorded locally at full quality on each person's machine
- Per-participant video tracks
- Screen share tracks, if a screen was shared
- An aligned stereo mixdown
- The transcript
What to take depends on the edit. A light-touch audio show can work from the mixdown alone. A real edit wants individual audio tracks so you can level and treat each voice separately. A video edit wants individual video tracks so you can cut between people and reframe.
If a guest's track is missing, they most likely closed their browser tab before the upload finished. Send them the join link again and they will see a Finish uploading prompt, since the file is still on their machine.
A Working Order
- Open the session. Rename speakers.
- Read the transcript with the agent panel. Note anything a fact-check verdict flagged that you did not address on air.
- Generate all four episode assets.
- Edit them. Check every name and number against the audio, since transcripts mishear proper nouns.
- Cross-reference best moments with your C markers, pick three clips.
- Go to Downloads. Pull what your edit needs.
- Build the episode page from the show notes, chapters, and the sources sitting in the agent cards.
Steps one through five happen before you touch an audio editor, which means the episode page can be built in parallel with the edit rather than after it.
Why the Middle Stage Deserves a Workspace
The post-recording stage is where podcasts quietly die. Recording is enjoyable and publishing is satisfying, but the work in between is fragmented across tools and it recurs every episode forever.
That workload is measurable in attrition. Forbes has covered why so many shows fail, and creator surveys point at sustainability directly: one study found 62% of full-time creators reporting severe burnout symptoms, with nearly half having considered quitting within six months.
Meanwhile the opportunity keeps growing. Edison Research puts monthly podcast consumption at an all-time high of 58% of Americans age 12 and older. The shows that reach that audience are the ones that keep publishing, and publishing consistently is mostly a question of whether the middle stage is manageable.
Small Things Worth Knowing
Sessions persist. Recording History keeps everything. Old episodes can still be mined for clips and assets.
Assets are drafts. Everything generated is meant to be edited. Treat the output as a starting point, always verify names and figures.
Agent cards are permanent. Research surfaced during a recording does not disappear when you stop. It is part of the session record.
Solo sessions work the same way. A solo recording produces a transcript, agent cards, episode assets, and audio downloads. There are simply fewer tracks.
Using It to Improve the Next Recording
Session Viewer is a production workspace, but it doubles as feedback on how you record. Three things are worth looking at deliberately every few episodes.
Which agent cards you ignored. If the panel is full of Producer Coach suggestions you never acted on, either the agent is wrong for your format or you were not glancing at the panel. Both are worth knowing. The same applies to Prep Desk: material that never surfaced means you loaded the wrong things into the session.
Where the transcript is messy. Long stretches of crosstalk in the transcript are stretches where the agents had little to work with and where your clips will be hard to cut. If the same pattern shows up every episode, it is a recording habit rather than a tooling problem.
How far your generated assets drift from what you publish. If you rewrite the show notes heavily every time, your custom instructions are not specific enough yet. Each round of editing is information about what to put in them. After three or four episodes of tightening, the drafts start landing close enough to publish with a light pass.
None of this requires extra work. It is reading what is already in front of you with a slightly different question in mind.
Open a Session You Already Recorded
The fastest way to understand Session Viewer is to open something you have already published, rename the speakers, and generate best moments.
Most hosts find a line they had forgotten entirely, plus a set of sources they thought they would have to look up again.
Start at app.podmod.ai.