Running a podcast myself, I have heard many times that using audiograms is a good way to repurpose your existing video content into video content for social media and so on. The benefit, I guess is that video these days seems to be getting a whole lot more organic and paid reach.
To others help with this, I have shared my notes on which audiogram tools to use based on my own experience which you can see below.
TLDR: in short, I use Waave and this is the one I recommend. It is the easiest to use, also has a freebie program that I use, and has pretty good features compared to the other options.
Top Tool Picks
Table of Contents
Summary of Results
Evaluation Criteria
So when I went about looking for tool there were three things that I was looking for. The first thing was whether or not I could easily actually make the audiogram. The next thing is whether or not it was easy to use or fairly intuitive to knock up audiograms quickly. And the last thing is whether or not the pricing was a good match for the value.
1. Waave
Waave is the most popular option out there and it’s pretty easy to see why. Generally speaking, it is very easy to use although it could probably be a little bit easier if it had some kind of snap to grid system for the design part.
It doesn’t have as many templates as the other options I’ve looked at here, but there’s definitely enough to get you going without having to create one yourself. It also seems to work with your podcast cover so you don’t really have to muck around trying to find what colours match your podcast cover to change the rest of the video. For example, you can see below that the audiogram wavelength and the background blur are automatically created by the program.
The nice thing about this program was it also automatically transcribes the audio for you which is very cool. But then again pretty much all of these programs do. It’s fairly easy to edit the transcript and come up with new breaks in the transcription captions.
Overall, this is a solid option and the one that I recommend. It has the right balance of usability, features, and price.
Pros
- Easy to use, guided creation
- Reusable templates, simply edit them to change for future audiograms
Cons
- Fewer templates to work from
- Needs a ‘snap to grid’ type feature
Pricing
Free to use, and paid version from $12.50 per month.
2. Headliner
Headliner is the next most common option out there so I had to have a look and see whether or not it was worth using. The interface is a little bit better with the steps shown along the top of the page, but something that was quite annoying was that the templates are not really templates.
What I mean here is that the templates are basically an image where different elements are layered on top. So if you don’t have a perfect background image that already has a white panel on it the text will be unreadable and the app will not facilitate you to make that design unless you open the background image in Canva and layer of the white box on top of your contents.
Honestly, once I got to the customizing stage of this I really just gave up because it was so much easier to use wave and audiogram which I talk about below.
Pros
- Nice pricing. Once you upgrade, you get unlimited audio
Cons
- BYO backgrounds. It’s not very friendly for creating new ones in those templates
- Less user friendly for editing
Pricing
Free to use, and paid versions from $7.99 per month.
3. Audiogram
This software seems to be not talked about that much so I really wanted to give it a crack and see how it was compared to the other major options out there.
From the website I could see it was fairly user-friendly which was nice. I had an expectation that it would be a polished project, and ultimately it was. I was quite surprised how good it was in comparison to headliner.
They sort of combined the best of both worlds in the other major audiogram applications. You can see it uses the step-by-step methodology along the top but it is much clearer in the way that you edit the piece.
It had a lot more templates on offer than Waave, which was nice. Also, it seems to have a lot more customisability of the design while still being guided like waves.
One small annoyance was that it doesn’t seem to automatically recognise the colours of your podcast cover and then offer you suggested colours to match this. No does it automatically populate the right supporting colours around your content.
But that’s somewhat of a minor issue. You can see I used Canva below to discover what colours would match my podcast cover here.
One other minor annoyance with this, was that there’s no autosave so if you somehow navigate away from the customization slash design stage of the audiogram, is very easy to accidentally lose your work.
If you navigate back to your audiogram in progress, it basically starts you at the beginning again.
One major cool feature though is that it supported post-roll contents. These were developed in a structured format, like wave, so that was really cool to see.
Overall, I would suggest this as the next runner-up to Waave as the best audiogram tool to use.
Pros
- Good range of templates
- Nice post-roll feature
Cons
- Not many fonts to choose from
- Doesn’t auto-save your progress, easy to lose your work
Pricing
Free to use, and paid version from $19 a month.
Closing Notes
I’m really keen to keep an eye on this segment of marketing tools, because this is a big part of content marketing. Repurposing. All the tools I surveyed were pretty solid however you can see which one is my favorite and why
The next best step from here is probably just to pick an audio snippet that you have made already and give it a go and see which one you like.
Other helpful bits and pieces:
- Descript: Instantly transcribe and edit your audio by editing the transcription.
- Canva color palette generator: Get a range of colors that match an image.
