Your host says "the bit where he coughs." You need 3:41.
Editing is the part you are good at. The rest of the job is chasing a host through email for notes that never carry a timecode, rebuilding a cut list by hand from what comes back, and asking twice to get paid. Soneam puts all three in one link.
The notes arrive attached to the audio
One host listens in the car and describes the moment. Another listens at a desk and gives you a number. Turning either into a cut list is unpaid work, and it happens after the episode is already late.
In Soneam the host plays the cut in the browser and clicks the moment. The note lands on the waveform at the second it refers to, and you open the project to a timeline with the work marked on it. Drag across a passage and the note covers a range instead of a point. That is what "take out this whole section" means.
The second cut remembers the first
Upload a new version and every note still open moves across, keeping its timestamp and a mark saying which cut it came from. The ones already resolved stay where they were, on the version they belonged to. The list maintains itself. Nobody has to keep it.
Sign-off you can point at
"I never approved that" is a conversation with no evidence on either side. When the host approves, Soneam writes down the name they entered, the time, their IP address, and exactly which cut. You can print it. It is not an e-signature and does not pretend to be one, but it is a fact rather than a memory.
The download can wait for the invoice
Put an amount on the delivery and the episode stays locked until the money is in. Card payments through Stripe unlock it the moment they clear; a bank transfer unlocks it when you press the button. Soneam takes 0% of either, on every plan including the free one, which matters more here than it sounds. The platforms that do this usually take a cut of a fee that was already small.
Loudness, if you want it
Apple Podcasts asks for −16 LUFS on a stereo episode and −19 LUFS on a mono one, ±1 dB. Spotify normalizes podcasts to the same −14 LUFS it uses for music. Soneam reads integrated LUFS and true peak off your file, and the free loudness meter takes the channel count into account, so a mono episode is not measured against the stereo number. You can use that meter without an account at all.
What is not here
Soneam was built for mixing and mastering engineers. The job turned out to have the same shape, which is why this page exists. The absence that will cost you most is the round trip: notes stay here, they do not travel back into Pro Tools, Audition or Hindenburg as markers, so you read the list on one screen and cut on another. After that come the publishing parts, none of which exist here either: no chapter markers, no transcript, no show notes, nothing that touches your RSS feed.
If what you need is a publishing tool, this is not it. If what you need is the part between "here is the cut" and "here is the invoice", that is what this does.
No podcast editor is using it yet, either. That is worth knowing before you move a client onto it. The honest suggestion is one episode, on a show where a rough week would not hurt anyone. What has shipped and when is on the changelog.
Frequently asked questions
Can more than one person leave notes on the same episode?
Yes. Anyone with the link can leave notes, and each note is signed with the name they typed, so a host, a producer and a client can all be on the same timeline without three separate email threads. Nobody creates an account to do it.
What loudness should a podcast episode be?
−16 LUFS for a stereo episode and −19 LUFS for a mono one, ±1 dB, with true peak no higher than −1 dBTP. Those are Apple Podcasts figures; Spotify normalizes podcasts to −14 LUFS, the same as music. You do not have to tell the tool which you have: it reads the channel count off the file.
Can I use this for video episodes?
No. Soneam takes audio only, so a video podcast can be reviewed here as its audio but not as its picture. If your show is watched as much as it is heard, a video-first review tool will suit you better.
Does it do chapter markers, transcripts or my RSS feed?
No, none of the three, and there is no date on any of them. Soneam covers the stretch between finishing a cut and being paid for it. Publishing is a different job and something else already does it for you.
Has Soneam been built for podcast editors?
It was built for mixing and mastering engineers, and the workflow is identical: send finished audio, collect notes against the timeline, get a sign-off, deliver the file. What is not built yet is anything podcast-specific, such as chapter markers, transcripts or an RSS step. If those are the parts you need, this is not your tool yet.
Those are the podcast-specific ones. How the software works in general is in the help pages.
Try it on one episode
Pick a show where a rough week would not hurt anyone, send the host a link, and see whether the notes come back usable. That is the whole test, and it costs one episode.