You record and publish a podcast on your computer by capturing your voice in the browser, trimming the dead air, exporting a podcast-ready MP3, and designing square cover art — all without sending a single file to a server. Forturis is the podcaster's studio that does every one of those steps locally on your machine. This guide walks the full workflow from a blank page to a finished episode folder you can upload anywhere.
What you need before you start
- A computer with a working microphone (a USB mic or a decent headset beats a laptop's built-in mic).
- Headphones, so your speakers don't bleed back into the recording.
- A quiet room. Soft furnishings help more than any plugin.
- A modern browser. That's it — no install, no account required to try it.
If you want a written outline first, keep it in a plain text file next to your browser. Reading from a script sounds stiff; reading from bullet points sounds like a conversation.
The full podcast workflow, step by step
1. Record your take
Open Voice Recorder and grant microphone permission when the browser asks. Do a ten-second test: record, stop, play it back. If it sounds distant, move closer to the mic — roughly a hand's width away — rather than turning the gain up, because gain also raises the room noise.
Record in segments rather than one long take. Intro, main topic, outro. If you fluff a sentence, pause for two seconds and say the sentence again from the top; you'll cut the bad one in the next step. Segments also mean a crash costs you thirty seconds instead of an hour.
2. Trim and tidy the segments
Move to Audio Trimmer. The podcast-segment preset loads settings tuned for spoken word, so you're not guessing at values. Work through each file:
- Trim the silence at the head and tail.
- Cut the false starts and the long 'ummm' pauses. Leave short breaths in — total silence sounds robotic.
- Tighten the gaps between sentences to roughly half a second. Long gaps feel like buffering to a listener.
- Listen back at 1.5× speed. Mistakes you miss at normal speed jump out when sped up.
3. Export a podcast-ready MP3
Use Audio Converter with the podcast-mp3 preset. That gives you the format every podcast host and directory accepts. For a stereo two-person show, 128 kbps is the practical floor; for a solo mono voice track, 96 kbps mono is fine and halves the file size. Keep your master files in the original format as well, so you can re-export later without re-recording.
4. Design your episode artwork
Podcast directories want square art, and 3000×3000 is the size that keeps you out of trouble with every platform. Mockup Generator with the podcast-cover preset starts you at the right dimensions. Keep episode art consistent with your show art: same font, same colour, only the episode number and title changing. That consistency is what makes a show look established in a crowded feed.
5. Make your promo assets
One episode should feed a week of posts. Social Pack Exporter takes your cover and audio and produces the sizes each platform expects, so you're not resizing by hand in five different tabs. Export a square for the feed, a vertical for stories and shorts, and a wide banner for your profile header.
6. Write the show notes and publish
Show notes are not optional if you want search traffic. Include a two-sentence summary, timestamps for each segment, links to anything you mentioned, and a transcript if you have one. Then upload your MP3 and cover art to whichever host you use. Because everything above happened on your machine, the files are already on your disk and ready to drag in.
Why doing this locally in the browser beats upload-based sites
Most online audio editors work the same way: you upload a file, their server processes it, you download the result. That model has three costs.
Privacy. Your raw voice track — including anything you said before you hit record properly, or anything a guest said off the cuff — sits on someone else's disk. With a local workflow in Forturis, the audio never leaves your computer. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to leak, nothing to delete, and no retention policy to read.
Speed. Uploading a 40-minute WAV over home broadband takes minutes. Processing it locally takes seconds. On a long episode, or on a slow connection, the difference is the whole session.
No file-size caps. Upload-based tools usually cap you somewhere — often right around the length of a real episode. Local processing has no file-size caps, so a two-hour interview is the same job as a five-minute trailer.
There's a fourth benefit that matters once you're publishing weekly: no watermarks. Free tiers on upload sites frequently brand your export. Nothing in this workflow stamps anything onto your audio or your artwork.
Common mistakes and pro tips
- Recording too hot. Aim for peaks around -12 dB, not touching zero. Clipping cannot be fixed later; a quiet take can be raised.
- Editing out every breath. It sounds unnatural and listeners notice the choppiness more than they'd notice breathing.
- Inconsistent loudness between segments. Record all segments in one sitting at the same mic distance, or normalise them together before export.
- Forgetting the ID3 tags. Title, artist, album and episode number should be set before you publish. Directories read them, and so do car stereos.
- Designing cover art last, at 2 a.m. Artwork is what people click on. Give it the same care as the edit.
- Keeping only the MP3. Keep the trimmed source files. You will want to re-cut a trailer or a clip later.
- Not listening on phone speakers. Most of your audience hears the episode through a tiny mono speaker. Check the mix there before you publish.
How the free allowance works
Forturis is free to use with no account, metered at 5 runs per day. A run is one export, however many files it contains. Without an account you can process up to 3 files per batch; with a free account that rises to 5, and the daily allowance goes to 15 runs. A Pro plan removes the batch cap and unlocks unlimited daily use, plus offline working if you install the site as an app. For a weekly show, the free allowance is usually plenty — you're doing a handful of exports per episode, not hundreds.
A realistic first-episode schedule
- 20 minutes: set up the mic, test levels, write bullet points.
- 30 minutes: record the segments.
- 25 minutes: trim and tighten.
- 10 minutes: export the MP3 and check it on a phone.
- 20 minutes: cover art and promo assets.
- 15 minutes: show notes and upload.
That's about two hours for a first episode, and closer to one hour once the steps are familiar. The workflow is the same whether you're solo or recording a co-host on separate tracks and trimming them individually.
What to do next
Once episode one is out, the routine barely changes: record, trim, export, design, publish. Keep a folder per episode with the raw takes, the trimmed files, the final MP3 and the artwork, and you'll never have to reconstruct a published episode from memory. Start with the recorder, work left to right through the tools, and your first episode is a couple of hours away.