A special guest takes over today’s episode! Cody Hanify works internally with the sales department for Podetize. He is a podcaster, stage actor, and short film producer based in Orange County, California. In this episode, Cody reviews the new Clubhouse App called Clubdeck, a third-party desktop app described as the “super powers for content creators on Clubhouse” by its creators. Listen to learn about all its neat new features and how you can make the most of it for your content creation.

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Clubdeck Review: The Clubhouse App To Make Social Audio Remarkably Easy With Cody Hanify

I work with Podetize internally, so I’ve known Tracy and Tom for a couple of years now. I’ve been working for them for a few months now. I’ve been very excited to be a part of the Podetize team and bring different perspectives here. What you’re going to be learning from me has probably come on multiple times here and talked about multiple different topics. I’m pretty knowledgeable in some tech fields here and there. I’ve done lots of music development here, so you’ll probably see me come on a lot and talk about new tech things included with this episode’s topic.

You’re probably going to be hearing and seeing lots of new faces on the show, as it’s our goal to get some of the team involved with new topics and keep it fresh for you. The last time that we had a guest, Melissa and Tracy went over some terms that get misconstrued with podcasters and they wanted to clarify a couple of things for you. It sounds like that might be a repeated segment, so I’m looking forward to the next glossary episode with both of them.

I want to take some time to thank the Feed Your Brand and the Podetize family for the opportunity. I’m excited to be a part of this. I’m happy to get the team involved in diversifying our knowledge with multiple perspectives within the company and also within the podcasting community because that’s what this is all about.

Without further ado, let’s get to this episode’s topic. What I’m going to be talking about and touching on is Clubdeck, Clubdeck Review: The Clubhouse App To Make Social Audio Remarkably Easy. That’s the title of this episode. I’m here to introduce you to a new computer app. It’s essentially what I’m here to do. You can maximize your Clubhouse experience, which I think is pretty cool. We all know about Clubhouse a little bit but I’m going to touch upon it in case some of you are new to Clubhouse.

I need to introduce this to the community and get this conversation through this community social engagement app. That’s essentially what Clubhouse is. Clubhouse is an audio-based social media app. The company describes itself as a new type of social product based on a voice that allows people everywhere to talk, tell stories, develop ideas, deepen friendships, and meet interesting new people around the world.

You can jump in and out of different chats or different subjects in something, akin to a live, free-flowing type of podcast. You can simply listen or choose to throw in your own thoughts. In theory, it’s supposed to be somewhat like a cocktail party, a social event, or a Clubhouse. When you see it in practice though, it comes across more of some mixture of like LinkedIn, a panel discussion, or a professional conference. It is usually what I typically have noticed going into these different chat rooms.

Vogue described Clubhouse’s experience as a “dizzying, bringing together of live podcast-style conversations.” They go on to say the social media app mimics real-life interactions as well too. I think that’s great timing for us to engage with social connections, especially over the last few years. If we’re inventing new ways to get across the multiple different platforms, we might as well take advantage of all of them.

Now, you might be asking yourself, why Clubhouse? Do people still use Clubhouse? Why should I use Clubhouse? Clubhouse is a great way to build and flush out ways to create and increase your listener engagement. You can check out the show’s episode titled Listener Engagement: Effective Ways to Foster Audience Participation and Comments. In that episode, Tracy shares experiences within the Clubhouse app. I would check that out to get Tracy’s perspective, especially early on when we were going through with that.

In that episode, Tracy explains her experience with the Clubhouse app. Some say Clubhouse’s biggest weakness is that to use it, you have to use your mobile phone device. You can only use your phone with this. This causes issues. Not being able to multitask on your phone while staying in the groups, creating this live engagement type of opportunity for people that are in these group chats is tough, especially when you’re only operating off of a mobile device.

 
I think the biggest drawback here with Clubhouse is because it’s only existing on a mobile device, you don’t have a high-quality microphone that you’ve been able to plug into this device and headphones really aren’t that well too. They don’t pick up good enough quality. When you want to create some great useful conversations, save them, and stream this type of audio, especially when you’re going into these group chats, you want to have the best audio quality possible. Also, keep in mind when you’re utilizing this, not everyone is going to be situated in this type of situation too.

Some people are tuning in through their mobile apps. This is my turn to share with all of our Podetize community what Clubdeck is and being able to utilize it at its fullest capabilities. We have a beautiful way to work around all the Clubhouse issues. Clubdeck is a third-party desktop app and the creators of the desktop app call it superpowers for content creators on Clubhouse.

This isn’t something that was made by Clubhouse. This is a third-party app that you install on your desktop. With Clubdeck, you can pretty much do the same thing you would do on the smartphone app with additional key features with a different user experience. Especially if you’re a content creator, I will read this because this is cool stuff here. As I said, you could use a professional microphone or a sound card to maximize your audio quality.

You can even reroute the audio through software like Loopback or BlackHole. The possibilities with that are endless. You can turn it into a music mode too. For people that understand that, you can now operate between 48 kilohertz and 128 kilobytes per second. There are no special cables required. You can turn that music mode on within the app. The biggest thing with Clubdeck and Clubhouse is user engagement or engaging with an audience. This is the best way to practice that.

 

It’s cool what Clubdeck offers here. They have custom sounds and jingles that you can utilize through the app’s interface or you can rip things directly from YouTube while you guys are in this app, going through whatever topic that we’re talking about in Clubdeck. You can take it directly from there and throw it in and it saves it in the audio. It’s seamless.

You can apply real-time audio effects like different voice changeovers. You can throw a reverb on your voice and this is all through Clubdeck. Now, with Clubhouse too, you can record these rooms and you can restream it to all of the different social media networks like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and all those. You can manage all of that within the Clubdeck app. There’s one interface that you’re utilizing all of the capabilities here. For the viewers out there, I’ll probably share my screen and go through a couple of those and kind of engage the listeners as much as I possibly can with that.

What I highly recommend is to check out that you can manage a chatroom like you’ve done it your whole life. You can set up a chat room there, develop your topics, and pick the speakers. It’s cool with the Clubhouse interface. We record highlights of your room in real-time as well too. Let’s say we’re talking and we want to get a discussion going. There’s a little bit of an audiogram that you want to cut, save and upload to YouTube or something like that. You can get that set up. You can cut little short clips with the little audiogram on it of whatever section you want to take out of that conversation and you can send it anywhere. It saves directly to your computer.

You can set up a backchannel to coordinate with live co-moderators. I’ll go into why a moderator might be very smart to have for you while you’re utilizing this interface because there are a couple of little workarounds here. Another thing cool thing about Clubdeck is you can find key people to invite on stage by browsing your audience bios with seamless ease. It’s so simple to be able to search for someone, add them in, and send them an invite.

They implemented keyboard shortcuts. What you can do here is utilize and navigate Clubhouse like a boss with these shortcuts. You can go through the Clubdeck app. You download it and it’ll show you all of those. That way, you can get through your room and get through the cool attachments that I was talking about with ease and pretty seamlessly as well too.

 

You can search rooms, users, and clubs. You can pin searches. You can pin links to the top of your room. Just copy it from the browser and import it in. You can have a live transcript going along with your room with Otter.ai integration as well. You can manage your Clubhouse replays with clicks and pick your favorite light. I know how some people like to pick different themes as well too. You can pick the darker theme, the lighter theme. I’m a lighter theme type of person. That’s my personality.

As I said, let’s take some time here. I’m going to go through a couple of things that I was talking about. That way, you can see what the device or the software looks like here. I’m going to try to paint the picture as well as I can for the readers. I’ve downloaded Clubdeck to my app. What you can do is you can type in a link. You can start a room here. Search any type of topic right here that you want to search on. You can start a room just like you would use Clubhouse normally on your Clubhouse app. Start your room. I already got one set up that way. I can show and navigate through a couple of these cool add-ons that you can utilize through this app.

I titled this room Podetize Coaching Call Test. I have it private so we can go through some of the settings and see what we got here. Controls are very simple right here. You can mute and unmute yourself at any time right. You can mute everyone with a whole button. There are different shortcuts for doing that as well. You can ping different people. If you want to type in someone, ping them and get them involved with this room, you can get that going.

Here’s the most important part, especially for your audio and microphone situation. You want to be able to set your settings. If you don’t know how to do that, go into the audio settings. I would do the headphones and whatever microphone you’re using right there. It might give a little bit of feedback because I did that because I have it muted.

The more you're engaging with your audience, the more special they're going to feel and the more that they're going to keep coming back as well. Click To Tweet

You can set it to different types of things and there is a music mode. It makes sure that your audio quality is dependent on the audio quality that is acceptable for you and your show. There are different things you can do here as well. They have these little audio effects. They have different claps here and comedy. It’s like people laughing and such and then a little ding.

You can load in your own custom sound. Let’s say you have any sounds that you like utilizing with your show, you can make sure that that’s going right there. You can also rip that effect from YouTube as well too. It’s a legal way for you to just go to YouTube, export an audio effect, put it in, and be able to control the volume. That was the audio effects.

There are some vocal effects too. You can make yourself sound very different and throw different types of reverb on to make it a little bit more fun. You can also record the rooms. You can start recording at any time you want to and you can stream that recording. Let’s say you wanted to stream live whatever we got going on right now. What it’ll do is you can stream it to YouTube. You can put in the URL here and utilize the stream key that’s utilized with the YouTube interface too.

What it’ll do is it’ll show you this day’s custom little audiogram with waveform files seamlessly going over it. You get to start streaming live on YouTube. You can clip the audios also. When I’m recording and getting things going, you’ll be able to clip the audio, save it, and be able to share it with anyone. It downloads everything easily. To operate your profile, you can go to your profile and you can change your status while you’re doing anything within this actual channel.

 

There are a couple of different other things that we can go through. What I think that you guys should check out, especially if you’re going to start utilizing this, is making sure you know how to utilize the backchannel. You can start a chat with anyone. My main recommendation for you is to have a moderator here to support you with all of these. That way you can chat with someone in real-time without it being actually in the discussion about any technical issues that are going on because, as we all know, Clubhouse isn’t perfect.

Sometimes more than one person can be talking at the same time or the audio quality isn’t as well as you would like it. This is something you would want to preplan out. Start a chat with someone and you can provide a private backchannel. The best way is to have an admin set up a backchannel to fill in the dead space while you fill the room. Keep talking to people and filling all that dead space when you’re trying to get everyone in.

That way, they can do sound checks on everyone. They’re listening and making sure that the audio quality before you set your room to public or you want to start recording. Sometimes when the audio comes out of it, the feedback or the recording was blown out or it’s sounding all muffled because no one was there to take a look at the audio quality while you guys were on.

It’s very important to have a moderator on with that backchannel so you can go back and forth talking about the different audio quality because, as I said, when you take it out sometimes it’ll be muffled and you’re not going to know until afterward. Being able to make sure that you get that set up ahead of time will help out your audio quality. Scheduling in advance, Clubdeck will allow you to duplicate and schedule events. Reoccurring different types of chats and such. You can use that in Clubdeck as well as Clubhouse.

Getting to know the interface as much as you can is something I highly recommend. I haven’t utilized Clubhouse or Clubdeck as much like crazy. I’m not a professional in it but I was able to talk to a couple of people here. Our client, Corinna Bellizzi, if you get in contact with her, she considers herself a pro in Clubdeck. If you have any other major questions involving tech that you can plug in with that, I recommend hitting her up or listening to her show, Care More Be Better. It’s a fantastic show. You should get a look at that.

That’s all I had to go over with Clubdeck. It’s a great way to use as an interface for Clubhouse, being able to multi-manage multiple different things. You can have your phone free to do everything. Setting up the back channels, different kinds of audio settings, and creating that audio engagement and listener engagement is essential for being a host that people want to keep coming back to.

The more you’re engaging with your audience, the more special they’re going to feel and the more that they’re going to keep coming back. That is all I had to share with Clubdeck in this episode. I wanted to say thank you again to Tom and Tracy Hazzard for letting me be a part of this episode and being able to showcase new technology for you in the podcasting community. We hope that you have a great and fantastic week. I can’t wait to talk to all of you again soon. Thanks again.

 

Important Links

• Clubdeck
• Clubhouse
• Listener Engagement: Effective Ways to Foster Audience Participation and Comments – Previous episode
• Loopback
• BlackHole
• Otter.ai
• Care More Be Better

 

About Cody Hanify

Cody Hanify works internally with the sales department for Podetize. He is a podcaster, stage actor, and short film producer based in Orange County, California. You can soon check out his new podcast he’s launching called We Watch It, where he and his co-hosts take their unique perspectives on films, tv, and other content.