Castmagic Review & tutorial 2024: Transform Your Content Creation Effortlessly

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If you’re thinking of purchasing and just doing a quick Google for “Castmagic review” to make sure it’s the right tool for you, check out these pros and cons of using it from someone who has been road-testing it since early 2023.

If you’ve already heard of Castmagic you might think it’s just a tool for podcasters to speed up their workflow, but having used the tool for almost 18 months I can tell you that you have no idea how powerful this software can be until you’ve used it yourself.

That’s why it’s important to hear it from someone who didn’t just buy it on Appsumo and make a video 5 minutes later!

If you are a small business owner, keep reading and I will explain how this amazing tool can help you market your business using content you have ALREADY created 🙌. You can upload a Reel, Tiktok video or other video or audio content and it will create marketing materials at the click of a button.

Castmagic.io isn’t just for podcasters!

If you are a podcaster looking to speed up your podcast post-production process, a YouTuber or a course creator, (or even if you’re just someone who attends a lot of online meetings) and have been considering if Castmagic ai might be the right fit for you keep reading!

If you are a small business owner who has audio or video content just sitting on your computer this tool is for you too! It can make marketing your business a LOT easier.

Here I’m sharing different use cases for how you can use Castmagic in your business.

CASTMAGIC USE CASES

SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

–Problem: You know you should be marketing, but you’re too busy.

– Solution: Castmagic can save you time by turning your existing content into marketing assets.

You know you “should” be marketing your business – creating social media posts, blog posts, lead magnets and writing email newsletters.

But let’s face it, that’s all very time-consuming and sometimes you are just overwhelmed or too busy working with clients and customers to get it done.

That’s where Castmagic can save you oodles of time. All you need is video or audio content that you have already created and Castmagic will turn that content into social media posts, lead magnets, draft blog posts and email newsletters.

Benefits:

– Create social media posts, lead magnets, draft blog posts, and newsletters.

– Generate meeting notes and action steps for client calls.

COURSE CREATORS

If you have ever created content for a course or membership you’ll know that it can take a lot more time than you originally anticipated!

That’s because you’re not only creating the actual course content, you also have to write lesson summaries or create student worksheets to go with every lesson.

If your video is long you might also need to add timestamps so your students can easily find the bit of the lesson that’s relevant for them.

Best practice is to create closed captions and transcripts to go with each lesson.

And that’s before you create a lead magnet, a social media post or an email newsletter to promote your course.

It’s enough to put you off ever creating a course …

This is where Castmagic can make your life so much easier! All you have to do is upload your lesson content and it will create a transcript, timestamps, lesson summaries, student worksheets, a quiz, social media posts, a draft blog post, a lead magnet and an email newsletter to promote your course 🤯.

Podcasters and Youtubers

Are you tired of spending countless hours creating podcast show notes, timestamps or video transcripts so that you can upload your podcasts or YouTube videos?

And then after all that you still have to come up with the energy to create content to promote your podcast, YouTube channel, course or membership (or pay someone else to do it).

If you have a podcast or have ever had to transcribe a video to make it more accessible for your audience, you know exactly how time-consuming that can be! 

Editing hours of long-form audio and extracting valuable content for social media and other platforms can take up a huge chunk of your time. That’s why I think you’ll love Castmagic, especially if you want to work smarter, not harder.

Castmagic can save you masses of time, energy and money!  

Use it to create podcast show notes or a YouTube description, timestamps, extract key quotes and create marketing materials to promote your podcast or video.

CASTMAGIC LONGER WALKTHROUGH – AUGUST 2024

What is Castmagic?

Introduction to Castmagic

Castmagic is an AI-powered tool designed to streamline podcast production and post-production tasks. It’s an all-in-one platform that helps content creators save time and produce valuable content assets.

But even if you are a small business owner who doesn’t create podcast or YouTube content, it can also save you hours on marketing your business!

Although originally it was designed for podcasters, helping them to efficiently extract key themes, takeaways, timestamps and social media posts, it would be a huge shame if you didn’t realise the huge host of other tasks you can let the AI work its magic on.

What is Castmagic AI?

If you think this tool is only for podcasters, you couldn’t be more wrong! YouTubers and online course creators have embraced the tool to speed up their processes and make their videos and audio content more accessible. 

If you create YouTube videos or videos for a course or membership or have video or audio content gathering digital dust on your computer, Castmagic could be an extremely valuable asset for your business.

It helps in repurposing your content, making it easier to share insights and engage your audience across various platforms.

By uploading a video or mp3 file, you can quickly generate timestamps and podcast show notes.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, it excels at content repurposing, allowing you to swiftly create draft blog posts, social media posts, key quotes, and email newsletters to promote your content efficiently.

Castmagic Features

Four main features make Castmagic stand out – transcript, AI content, magic chat and studio.

How it works

Castmagic’s interface is so easy to use with such a clean UX (user experience) that I think you’ll love it and find it intuitive.

Set up a “Space” – think of a space as a folder for a specific type of content. For example, you could set up a space for: 

• Podcast files
• Zoom recordings (to transcribe meetings/sales calls)
• Course/membership content
• Coaching/Q&A sessions
• Webinar files
• YouTube videos, etc.

Right now, this may not sound all that exciting – but there’s a method to my madness, so just do it and very soon you’ll see why and thank me!

Pro Tip: 🤓 Add “Magic words” – niche-specific words that AI might otherwise not recognise when generating transcripts – for example, brand names or acronyms. This will help to improve the accuracy of your transcripts.

I sometimes add words that I know I will use if I am recording a tutorial or lesson for my membership – e.g. “MailerLite” because it cuts down on editing time later.

Choose a content profile

Choose a content profile or you can create your own. 

The predefined content profiles (“content presets”) are useful later, because when your transcript is ready the AI Content feature will generate content based on the content profile you select. 

For example, if you choose the meeting content profile, the AI Content feature will generate action items, recording highlights and agenda points.

This is absolute gold – take a peek at the content presets and you’ll see what I mean. 

You might also want to explore the featured community prompts and set up your space so that the AI will  generate a quiz or a lead magnet based on the transcript (those are just a couple of examples of what it can do!)

Import your audio/video content

Upload your audio or video content – accepted file formats: 

• .m4a, .mp3, .mp4, .wav, .aac, .mov 
• paste a URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Reels TikTok

Or if you need to, you can configure an RSS feed, or there are Zapier and Zoom integrations (if you use Zoom Pro).

Pro Tip: 🤓 Zoom Pro integration – released in August 2024, this feature could be game-changing for your workflow. Save time by integrating Castmagic with your Zoom account to allow direct import of Zoom cloud recordings.

Transcript 

The Transcript feature on its own is a massive benefit for you if you’re a podcaster or create course or membership content. Keep reading and I’ll explain why!

Simply upload an MP4 (video) or MP3 (audio) file of your podcast episode, (or any of the other formats mentioned above) and Castmagic will generate a high-quality, accurate transcript in minutes.

This feature not only saves time but also enhances accessibility, allowing listeners who prefer reading or those with hearing impairments to enjoy your content.

Even better, there’s no need to sit around waiting for the transcript to generate because a) it’s usually very quick to process and b) it will notify you by email when the transcript is ready (you can turn this setting off in your dashboard if you don’t need it).

If you create videos for YouTube or are an online course creator, you’ll also find this feature invaluable as it will allow you to create closed captions and transcripts in minutes, saving you oodles of time. 

Pro Tip: 🤓 Match the speakers when you upload your transcript, because this will save you time later when extracting quotes or writing a podcast intro.

I used to upload podcast audio files to Otter, manually edit the transcript to extract quotes for social media and draft an email newsletter based on the transcript. Believe me, Castmagic offers a much more efficient workflow! You’ll see why in a minute…

AI CONTENT

The AI content feature is a game-changer for podcasters, YouTube creators, and people who host online courses or memberships.

Pro Tip: 🤓 You can’t upload audio content to ChatGPT – that’s why Castmagic is so useful.

You might be missing the benefit of Castmagic and wondering why you can’t just use ChatGPT – did you know that you can’t actually upload audio content to ChatGPT?

And if you’re worried that you won’t be able to use the custom prompts that you’re used to, never fear, Castmagic has its own custom prompts trained off high-performing content.

It creates summaries of your uploaded files, identifies key themes and takeaways, and generates timestamps.

This can save you significant time, allowing you to edit the output to maintain your unique voice.

For podcasters, it drafts show notes and blog articles to promote episodes.

Membership hosts can upload Q&A calls and use the tool to create summaries and timestamps, making it easier for members to navigate the content.

Course creators benefit by generating lesson notes efficiently and you can also extract soundbites to promote your course on social media or in your newsletter.

This is where the content presets I mentioned earlier come into their own. If you’re a coach and select that specific preset the AI Content feature will generate worksheets, plans, and summary reports for coaching sessions.

You can also create custom prompts yourself if you have something specific in mind.

Magic Chat

Think of the magic chat feature as Castmagic’s answer to ChatGPT, but specific to your content. And remember that you can’t feed audio content to ChatGPT!

This is where you have another opportunity to experiment with the featured community prompts.

Or if you’re used to using custom prompts, create your own prompts and save them to your AI Content tab to run that prompt on all previous and future recordings.

CONS

ai content needs editing

The content generated sounds a bit generic as-is so I wouldn’t recommend using the AI content or magic chat features without editing.

Otherwise, you are going to sound like a robot. If you take the blog or newsletter content and share it without personalising it I think it would be completely off-putting. 

The good news is that the output gives you a starting point.

Normally I scan the suggested headings and sentences and re-work the ideas and suggestions in my own voice. 

ADD MAGIC WORDS FOR ACCURATE TRANSCRIPTIONS

It struggled a bit with my Irish accent and soft “t” at times when generating the transcript, but it’s really easy to edit so that wasn’t a dealbreaker for me.

I found that adding “magic words” to my Space helped to reduce this issue a lot. I even uploaded a transcript and asked my VA to edit it and she sent me an email asking me if I had already done it myself in the meantime! 

That’s because there were actually only a couple of words here and there that the tool got stuck on, so the magic words helped significantly improve the output. 

What are the key features of the Castmagic AI tool?

The key features of Castmagic include transcript creation, summary extraction, social media post creation, and podcast asset creation. These features help you save time and focus on the creative aspects of podcast creation.

• create compelling titles
• generate an introduction, key topics, and bullet points
• extract key points from your audio or video and create social posts – Reel scripts, a LinkedIn post and Twitter threads
• automate transcription and timestamps
• create a blog post based on your audio or video upload using Magic Chat (that you can edit to sound like you)
• generate FAQs 
• summarise the content you upload

My experience using Castmagic

I’ve been using Castmagic for over a year and it has helped me to make my course videos more accessible with time stamps and closed captions and that’s only one way it has saved me time and energy.

Before finding Castmagic I was relying on tools like  otter.ai and Rev.com to generate transcripts, but the problem was that the results weren’t always accurate and needed a lot of editing at times.

But if you only use Castmagic for generating show notes and timestamps then you’re definitely missing out.

I also use it ALL THE TIME for transcribing calls with clients (with their permission of course!) so I’m over the moon about the Zoom Pro integration because it will save me the extra step of downloading the recording and uploading it to the tool. 

I also love using it for adding closed captions to videos in my courses and membership – I just download the .srt version of the transcript and upload it to my video editing platform (ScreenPal). Easy peasy and it makes my Irish accent easier to understand for my students who are abroad.

Customer support is excellent, they are so responsive. I had a quick query early on just after purchasing and I got a personal email the same day helping me out.

There’s also a very engaged Slack channel where the community share their use cases, custom prompts

If you’re on the Starter or Rising Star plans you can even schedule a live 30-minute onboarding call (interactive group webinar) if you feel like you need help to customise your setup or want to ask a question.

But if you can’t stretch to the Starter or Rising Star plans right now, don’t worry, because no matter what plan you’re on, you can access live chat support.

Is CastMagic worth it?

Absolutely, yes! Castmagic is well worth the price.

At $276 a year for the hobby plan (saving you 40% if you pay annually) – the ROI from this tool and the time and energy saved are so worth it. You can also buy it for $39 a month and cancel your subscription if there are months that you aren’t podcasting or creating videos so you get the most out of it.

But instead of taking my word for it, why not just start a free trial and see if you like it.

Castmagic is extremely user-friendly and makes it very easy to repurpose your audio and video content.

Why do you need Castmagic?

How does Castmagic save you time and money?

It frees up your time massively! Instead of spending hours transcribing a video or audio file, you can use AI to do the heavy lifting so you can focus on what’s most important to you. 

Just upload your file or add the YouTube link, wait a few minutes, and save yourself hours a week. 

If you’ve been paying monthly subscriptions for tools like Rev or Otter.ai to create your transcripts, castmagic’s cutting-edge AI technology will save you so much time and money. 

What are the benefits of Castmagic?

It’s really user-friendly, simply upload your file, turn your audio into assets instantly, and save yourself from the tedious work of extracting content from your long-form video or audio. 

Castmagic plans and pricing -what’s included

Castmagic offers 3 plans: Hobby, Starter, and Rising Star. (There’s also an Enterprise option if you have custom needs).

I’ve had a plan that gives me 600 minutes a month since 2023 (that option is no longer available)and the Hobby plan (the lowest tier) is all you need unless you are a prolific content creator or have a lot of older content you’d like to repurpose. But let’s go through the various tiers:

The best plan for most solo podcasters, video creators and course creators is the Hobby plan.

I’ve only maxed out my monthly minutes limit once since 2023 and even then I’ve had the option to wait a few days until the next month or upgrade for extra a la carte monthly minutes. It only costs 20c per minute if it turns out you need extra minutes (on the Hobby or Starter plans) or 10c on the Pro tier.

The other thing to note is that when I hit the limit, it was because I was creating transcripts and lesson summaries for more than 6 clients.

The only reason you’d need the Starter or Pro tiers is if you’re a prolific creator or using it as an agency/for multiple clients.

Castmagic is normally 39 dollars a month for the “hobby”/lowest price plan (300 minutes a month) – check their website for current pricing, so if you feel like the tool could be useful to turn your long-form audio into assets, the one-time deal is a no-brainer and could definitely save you money in the long-run. 

They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee — no questions asked. Yearly plans are available at a 40% discount.

Originally, Castmagic seemed to be primarily aimed at podcasters, but course creators and people creating YouTube content quickly cottoned on that it could be really useful for making their video and audio content more accessible (more on that later).

Who is it for?

• Podcasters, Youtubers
• Course Creators
• Coaches
• Copywriters 

How does Castmagic work?

What are the steps involved in using Castmagic for your podcast post-production?

The steps involved in using Castmagic for your podcast post-production include uploading your podcast mp3 audio, extracting valuable content, creating summaries and transcriptions, and creating social media posts and podcast assets.

It struggled a little bit with my Irish accent, but it was easy to copy the transcript it generated and tweak it to be more accurate.  I also found that adding certain “magic words” when uploading the episode (like my name and words that I knew it might not recognise) helped to make the transcript and content more accurate. 

How does Castmagic convert your podcasts into summary and social posts?

Castmagic uses AI technology to extract valuable content from your podcast audio and create summaries and social media posts. This helps you easily promote your podcast on different platforms and attract a wider audience.

What are the AI features of Castmagic for better content output?

The AI features of Castmagic include speech-to-text and natural language processing for accurate transcripts and summaries. This helps you create high-quality content assets that will attract and engage your audience.

What are the key features of the Castmagic AI tool?

How does Castmagic help you to save time in your editing and post-production work?

Save time in post-production by automating time-consuming tasks like transcription and summary creation. This allows you to focus on more important tasks like content creation and audience building.

What are the benefits of using Castmagic to convert your podcasts into text transcripts and timestamps?

The benefits of using Castmagic to convert your podcasts into text transcripts and timestamps include easier content creation and better SEO. Transcripts and timestamps make it easier for your audience to consume your content, and make it easier for search engines to index your content.

How does Castmagic automate your podcast post-production and upload your content to mp3?

Castmagic automates post-production by using AI to extract valuable content and convert it into text transcripts and summaries. It then creates social media posts and podcast assets that can be easily uploaded to different platforms, including mp3.

If you’re looking for a tool that can streamline your podcast post-production process and free up more time for you to focus on content creation, consider Castmagic as your ai content editor!

Conclusion

Castmagic is an excellent tool if you have a podcast or create audio or video content and want to save time and produce high-quality content assets.

Its AI-powered features make it easy to automate post-production, and it’s an affordable solution compared to outsourcing to someone else to do this stuff for you manually. (That doesn’t mean that I think robots should replace human jobs, I just think there might be better uses for your VA or other team members if you have them).

Give Castmagic a try and see how it can help you save time and produce better content!

Found this post helpful? Be sure to check out my resources page where I share other tech tools I think you’ll love.