Anchor

Great podcasting for beginners

Free From Anchor FM Inc, anchor.fm Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 10.0 or later

Anchor says it’s the easiest way to start a podcast, and it lives up to that claim: it’s incredibly easy to record, produce, and publish a professional–sounding podcast either by yourself or with others. You can even include voice messages from your listeners and music from Apple Music or Spotify, and there’s no limit to how many podcasts you can create.

Creating a podcast is simple. Put in some basic information such as titles and episode names and then simply record the bits you want. You can record solo or start a group recording with other Anchor users (group recording’s in– app), and when you’re done recording and editing, publishing to the major podcasting platforms is made completely effortless.

Anchor was originally designed for people to create their own online radio stations before pivoting to become a podcasting platform, and that shows now. While it’s really easy to add music and transitions between sections and to quickly rearrange the order of everything, you can’t do much with the actual audio recordings beyond trimming the start and finish. If you want to get into audio editing and multitrack arrangements for really complex podcasts, a more intricate app is needed.

Anchor is particularly good for audio beginners and the whole process is as simple as it gets, but we did encounter some issues. It was very prone to crashing on iPad whenever we brought in external audio from the likes of Spotify, and many artists there were unavailable, presumably because of licensing reasons. But these are minor niggles. The bigger concerns are over branding and ownership.

Anchor is designed to host your content and publish to the likes of Apple, Google Play Music, and Spotify, but you’re doing it under the Anchor umbrella: it brands your content and it is the publisher, so you won’t get direct access to statistics than if you published podcasts yourself.

the bottom line. Anchor is very easy to use, so it’s ideal for beginners, but it may be a little too restrictive for some.

Anchor is simple to use, but it’s capable of producing quite complex podcasts.

Editing and transitioning between audio tracks is easy.