Recording one person is straightforward. Recording three or four across different cities, browsers, and internet connections is where most podcast workflows fall apart. Someone's audio clips out. A guest's file never uploads. You finish the session with a single mixed track and no way to fix the one person who sat too far from their microphone.
Podmod Studio is built for that second scenario. This guide walks through a complete multi-guest session: creating the room, getting people in, recording everyone locally in full quality, and walking away with per-person tracks you can actually edit.
What Podmod Studio Records
Before the setup steps, it helps to understand what is happening under the hood, because it determines what you can fix later.
During a Studio session, each participant's microphone and camera are recorded locally, on their own machine, at full quality. Those files upload to your episode as the take progresses. What everyone hears in the live call is a compressed real-time stream, but that stream is not what gets saved.
This distinction matters more than almost any other technical choice in remote podcasting. Recording guidance across the industry consistently identifies the same failure mode: when the only copy of your audio is the one that traveled over the network, your episode quality is capped by the weakest connection in the call. A dropout becomes a permanent hole in the recording. Local capture separates the two, so a guest with unstable Wi-Fi still delivers a clean file.
Studio also captures video tracks and screen share tracks the same way, and produces an aligned stereo mixdown when you want a single file to work from.
Step 1: Create the Session
Open Podmod Studio and choose New session. You have two options:
- Start now. The room opens immediately and you can copy the invite link right away.
- Schedule for later. Set a date and time in your timezone. This is the better choice for booked interviews, because it unlocks the calendar invite and the guest-side countdown.
Guest capacity depends on your plan: Standard hosts 1 studio guest per session, Pro hosts 4, and Pro Max hosts 8. Pick the room size before you send invites so you are not renegotiating with a guest who cannot get in.
Step 2: Send the Invite
Once the room exists, the control bar gives you two ways to bring people in:
- Copy invite puts the join link on your clipboard. Send it however you normally talk to guests.
- Calendar downloads a calendar file with the session details and the join link embedded, so the link is sitting in their calendar entry at the right time instead of buried in a thread from three weeks ago.
Guests do not need a Podmod account. They do not need to install anything. The link opens a browser page, and that is the whole onboarding process for them.
If you want to keep the room closed once everyone has arrived, use Lock. It prevents anyone new from joining, which is worth doing on sessions where the link has been forwarded around.
Step 3: Run the Tech Check
This is the step most hosts skip and most hosts regret.
Before entering the room, both you and your guests get a setup screen: Check your camera, microphone, and connection before entering the studio. Guests see the same thing on their join page, and they can test everything while they wait. On scheduled sessions, the Join button unlocks 15 minutes before the start time, which gives people a real window to sort out a wrong microphone selection without eating into your recording.
Use that window. The most common remote recording problems are not exotic. They are a guest recording through laptop speakers instead of their headset, a browser that never got microphone permission, or a camera pointed at a ceiling. All three are visible in the precheck and invisible once you are ten minutes into a good conversation.
When everyone looks and sounds right, choose Set up and enter.
Step 4: Configure Your Agents Before You Record
The Studio control bar carries the same three preparation panels as solo recording: Agents, Context, and Personalize.
Agents lets you choose which live agents run during this take. The full set is Research Agent, Fact Checker, Media Finder, Producer Coach, Prep Desk, and Rundown. You can toggle them individually before or during the recording. For a multi-guest conversation, Producer Coach and Fact Checker tend to earn their place: the first surfaces follow-up questions while a guest is still in the moment, the second checks claims, stats, dates, and attributions as they are said.
Context is where you upload the session material: notes, files, URLs, and guest bios. Anything you load here is what the Prep Desk agent draws from during the take.
Personalize holds your custom instructions. You can write them directly, or paste a link to your show and let Podmod research the channel and draft producer-style guidance for your format.
Set these before you hit record. Agents can be toggled mid-session, but uploaded context is far more useful when it is loaded before the first question.
Step 5: Record
Press Record. Each participant's local capture starts, and the research panel on your side begins surfacing cards tied to what was just said. Guests do not see your agent panel. The research is for the host.
While recording, you get three marker hotkeys that write timestamped notes into the session:
- M drops a generic marker
- C flags "clip this"
- X flags "edit out"
These are small and they matter. A marker takes half a second and saves you from scrubbing a ninety-minute file later looking for the moment your guest said the thing you want to cut into a clip. The markers persist with the session and show up alongside the transcript afterward, and the chapter marker generation reads them.
You also have per-participant controls during the take. You can mute a participant, or remove one entirely if someone joins by mistake.
Step 6: End the Take and Save
When you are done, end the session. Podmod prompts you to label the take and save it to your Recording History.
Two things happen at this point that are worth watching:
Track uploads finish. Each participant's local file finishes uploading to your episode. If a guest closes their tab too early, Podmod detects the incomplete upload and shows a Finish uploading prompt the next time they open the link, so the take can still be completed. Tell guests to leave the tab open until they see the confirmation. It is the single most useful instruction you can give them.
Optional track sharing. If you enable Share tracks with guests, each guest can download their own tracks from the session. Some guests will ask for this so they can post their own clips. It is off unless you turn it on.
Step 7: Collect Your Episode Kit
Open the session in Session Viewer. It has three tabs:
- Transcript, with the agent cards from the recording linked to the lines that triggered them
- Episode Assets, where you generate and edit the episode description, show notes, chapter markers, and best moments
- Downloads, where you pull per-participant audio and video, screen share tracks, and an aligned stereo mixdown
You can rename speakers here too, which is worth doing before you generate assets. Show notes that say "Speaker 2" are show notes you have to rewrite.
A Realistic Pre-Session Checklist
Send this to guests a day ahead:
- Use headphones. Any wired pair. This stops your voice from bleeding back into their microphone.
- Open the link in a desktop browser, not a phone.
- Join 10 minutes early and run the camera and microphone check.
- Close other tabs and applications that use the microphone.
- Leave the tab open until the upload confirmation appears at the end.
None of this is Podmod-specific advice. It is the baseline for any browser-based remote recording, and it removes most of what goes wrong.
Why Multi-Track Matters for Editing
Podcasting has grown into a genuinely large medium. Edison Research found that 58% of Americans age 12 and older now consume a podcast each month, an all-time high, with weekly consumption at 45%. Video has become central to that: YouTube is now the most-used podcast service among weekly consumers.
That combination raises the editing bar. If you are publishing video as well as audio, you need separate tracks per person to cut cleanly, level individual voices, and reframe shots. A single mixed file gives you none of that. Per-participant audio and video, plus the aligned mixdown as a reference, is the difference between an edit you can shape and an edit you can only trim.
Common Problems and What to Do
A guest cannot get in. Check your plan's guest limit and whether the room is locked. On scheduled sessions, joining opens 15 minutes before start.
A guest sounds thin or distant. They are almost certainly on a built-in laptop microphone. Have them switch inputs in the device settings during the precheck.
Someone's track is missing after the session. They likely closed the tab before the upload finished. Send them the link again and have them use the Finish uploading prompt.
Echo in the room. Someone is not wearing headphones. It is always this.
Start Recording
The setup above takes about ten minutes the first time and roughly two minutes every time after. What you get for it is a multi-guest session where each person's audio and video exist as a full-quality file you control, with research and fact-checking already done during the conversation instead of after it.
Try it on your next interview at app.podmod.ai. The 14-day trial does not require a card, and Studio is included on the paid plans.