Iris

Iris is the kind of tool you find when you get tired of Riverside's per-track math. You spin up a room, invite up to nine people, and each side records locally to lossless WAV and MP4 up to 4K. When a four-person hour-long episode bills as one hour rather than four, the difference compounds fast for any show with regular guests.

Real-time captions saved with the recording are a nice touch for show notes, and the export flow drops you clean files instead of nudging you into a proprietary editor. Where it falls short is the surrounding ecosystem — there's no built-in hosting, no integrated AI cleanup like Magic Dust, and the integration list is short.

You're expected to plug it into your existing post-production stack. That suits engineers who already have Hindenburg or Pro Tools and just need a reliable capture layer, but solo creators looking for an all-in-one will probably want Riverside or Zencastr instead.

As a pure recording tool, it's one of the most honest options in 2026. The free hour per month is enough to test the workflow end-to-end before committing, and the WAV export means you can drop straight into whatever editor you already use.