You’ve been almost-podcasting
for years.
Record short thoughts when they hit. Sidebar stitches them into a polished episode on the schedule you pick: mastered, intro’d, outro’d, ready to share.
Currently in TestFlight beta. Pro features are unlocked for testers while we polish the App Store release.
It was never the recording.
You’ve thought about doing a podcast. You’ve also thought about the microphone you don’t own, the editing software you don’t know, the intro music, the cover art, the cohost you don’t have, the hosting plan, the RSS feed, and the Saturday afternoon you can’t find. By the time you’ve decided where to start, the idea has cooled.
Blogger fixed this for writing. You opened a browser, you typed, you hit publish. No print run, no design committee, no permission slip. Somewhere along the way, you were a blogger.
Sidebar is the same shape, for the podcast. Talk for a few minutes when something hits. We handle the assembly. On Sunday, there’s an episode.
The blog made anyone a writer. This makes you a podcaster.
Record a few minutes every day. Let Sidebar handle the rest.
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Record
Tap the record button. Talk for a minute or two, then save.
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Review
Your week assembles itself by day. Tap any clip to trim.
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Polish
One tap removes noise, levels every clip, masters the lot.
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Release
On the schedule you set. Share, download, or publish to a host.
Everything that turns a folder of memos into an episode.
- Capture
Talk when the thought lands.
Open the app. Tap record. Two minutes later you have a clip filed under today.
- Auto-organised
A week, by day.
Every clip is timestamped and slotted into the right day automatically. No project files, no folders, no naming.
- Date markers
Spoken transitions.
An AI voice reads the date between days, so the listener feels the rhythm of the week. Uses your own AI voice key, your licence.
- Music
Bed, intro, outro.
Upload your own bed or generate one through your AI music service of choice. Sidebar tucks it under the voice, ducks it where it should, levels everything in.
- One-tap polish
Sound like a studio.
Background noise removed, every clip levelled, soft limiting and de-essing applied across the whole episode. One button.
- Schedule
Release on your rhythm.
Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or a custom cadence. Sidebar assembles the next episode in the background, ready when it’s time.
- Ship
Export, share, publish.
Export a clean .m4a, share it anywhere, or publish straight to your hosting platform of choice (rolling out). Your audio, your platform.
Your keys. Your audio. Your podcast.
Audio cleaning runs on the phone. Sidebar leans on Apple’s on-device intelligence wherever it can, and on other on-device neural models for the rest, so noise removal, levelling, and mastering all happen without your recordings ever leaving the device.
The bits that need cloud AI, the spoken date markers and the optional music bed, run through whichever providers you bring keys for, so the licence sits with you, not us. Your recordings stay on the device until the moment you choose to publish. We don’t ingest your audio, we don’t train on it, and we couldn’t if we wanted to.
Sidebar is built by an independent developer. Pro keeps the lights on, the servers minimal, and the roadmap pointed where the people who use it want it to go.
Frequently asked
The questions that come up most. If yours isn’t here, write to hello@usesidebar.app.
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Do I need an AI voice or music key?
Only if you want spoken date markers between days, or AI-generated music beds. Sidebar uses your own keys for whichever providers you choose, so the usage is licensed under your account, not ours. Without a key, you can still record, edit, polish, and export. The date markers will just be silent transitions.
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Can I publish to Apple Podcasts or Spotify?
Yes. Sidebar exports a clean .m4a and is rolling out one-tap publishing to popular podcast platforms. Spotify is the simple case: their Spotify for Podcasters product is itself a host, so you can publish straight to it. Apple Podcasts works through your host’s RSS feed (Apple don’t store audio themselves), so once your episode is on a host, Apple picks it up automatically and so do most other directories.
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What happens if I miss a day?
Nothing. Days without a clip are skipped silently. The week assembles itself from whatever you actually recorded. Sidebar isn’t a streak tracker, it’s a release valve.
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Can I edit a clip after recording?
Yes. Tap any clip to trim the start and end non-destructively, or re-record it. The original audio stays intact until you delete it.
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Is my audio uploaded anywhere?
No. Recording, editing, polish, and export all happen on your device, using Apple's on-device intelligence where possible and other on-device neural models for the rest of the audio cleaning. The only time audio leaves your phone is if you choose to publish to a podcast host. Your voice notes are never sent to Sidebar.
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Can I cancel?
Anytime, from your iOS subscription settings. Pro features stop at the end of the current billing period; your recordings stay yours.
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What about Family Sharing?
Pro is enabled for Family Sharing, so a single subscription covers everyone in your family group.
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What does the free version do?
Everything Pro does, except the export carries a short Sidebar advert at the end and music can’t be embedded into the file. Pro removes the advert, embeds your music bed, and unlocks direct publishing.