Recording a voice reading with SoulCast Studio

Overview

SoulCast lets you read your poem out loud and attach the recording right to the poem page, so readers can hear the piece in your own voice — your breath, your pauses, the inflection no on-page formatting can carry. The whole flow lives in the poem composer, next to title, categories, and banner.

Recording happens right in your browser. There’s no app to install, no separate file to drag in, and no editing tool to learn. You press the round record button, read the poem, press the square stop button, listen back, and either keep the take or discard it and try again. Each poem keeps one reading. To swap it, use Replace and record a new one.

What you’ll need

• An active GS Pro subscription. If yours lapses, recordings you’ve already attached keep playing on your poems — you just won’t see the SoulCast Studio record button in the composer until you resubscribe.
• A working microphone on the device you’re using — built-in or external — and permission for GS Poetry to access it. Your browser will ask the first time.
• A supported modern browser. SoulCast works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari on desktop, and on most mobile browsers that allow microphone access.
• A take under 15 MB. That’s comfortably long for the vast majority of poems — typically about 15 minutes of speech. If yours runs over, record a shorter version (or split a very long piece across multiple poems).

Step-by-step

Record a reading on a new poem

1. Go to Compose a Poem from the global header or your poems tab. Write your poem and fill in title, categories, banner, and any other settings the way you would for a normal publish.
2. Scroll to the SoulCast Studio panel. When the studio is idle, the ON AIR sign at the top stays unlit and the panel reads Start Recording.
3. Click/tap the round red record button. The first time you do this on a device, your browser will ask for microphone access — allow it.
4. The ON AIR sign lights up red, the record button turns into a square stop button with a pulsing ring, and a large timer counts up. A live waveform below draws what the mic is picking up in real time.
5. Read your poem out loud. Take your time — pauses are part of the performance.
6. When you’re done, click/tap the square stop button. To throw the take away and start fresh without saving anything, click/tap Cancel instead.
7. Your take appears under Your Takes (Step 1 of 2). You can keep up to three: click/tap Record take 2 to try again. When you’re done, click/tap Next.
8. On Step 2 of 2: listen and choose, click/tap a take to play it. To record more, click/tap Back to recording. When you’re happy, you have three choices:
   • Use Take (followed by the take’s number) — keeps that take. On a new poem, the clip travels with the poem and attaches the moment you publish, save as draft, or schedule. On an existing poem, it uploads and attaches immediately.
   • Download MP3 — saves a copy to your device as soulcast_<your-poem-title>.mp3 so you have it offline too.
   • Discard (or Discard All when you have more than one take) — throws your takes away after you confirm. The studio returns to idle and you can record a fresh one.
9. Finish creating your poem the way you normally would — Publish Now, Save Draft, or Schedule for Later. The recording rides along with whichever action you pick.

Add or replace a recording on an existing poem

1. Open My Poems and click/tap the poem you want to record for.
2. On the poem’s page, click/tap the pencil icon (Edit Poem) to open the composer.
3. Scroll to SoulCast Studio. If a reading is already attached, you’ll see it in a player, with Replace, Download MP3, and Remove buttons. To swap it out, click/tap Replace, then Record a New One to confirm. Record, click/tap Next, and choose Use Take. The old reading is deleted for good only when you use a new take. If you discard your new takes instead, the old one stays. To delete it without recording a new one, click/tap Remove and confirm.
4. If no reading is attached yet, the panel shows the round record button directly. Record, review, and choose Use Take to upload and attach.

Listen back to your own attached reading

1. In the composer, your attached reading shows in the same player readers get — press play. On the live poem page, press play on the SoulCast player above the poem.
2. The reading starts streaming, and you’ll hear what readers will hear.

What listeners see and hear

On your published poem page, the SoulCast player sits just above the poem. It shows SoulCast by your username, a play button, the shape of your voice as a waveform, the time, and a speed button that switches between 1x, 1.25x and 0.75x. Listeners can click anywhere on the waveform, or press and drag, to move through the reading. Pressing play streams it on the spot — no download, no extra clicks, no signup. A reading stops when it ends; it doesn’t loop.

• Follow Along. When a reading has it, each line of the poem lights up as you read it, the page scrolls to keep that line in view, and clicking a line jumps the reading there. Listeners can turn it off with the Follow along switch; the (i) beside it explains what it does.
• Mini player. If a listener scrolls away while it plays, a small player docks at the bottom of the screen with the poem’s title, the time, play/pause and an X to stop. Tapping the title brings them back to the full player.

Listening is open to everyone. Logged-out visitors can play it, free members can play it, other GS Pro members can play it. SoulCast is a creator tool gated behind GS Pro on the recording side — never a paywall on the listener side.

A note on the format

SoulCast captures audio in whatever format your browser supports natively, then re-encodes the take to MP3 right in the browser before it’s previewed, downloaded, or saved. That means every reading attached to a poem — and every clip you download for offline keeping — is a universally playable .mp3, no matter which browser or device you recorded on.

If something goes wrong

• “The record button isn’t showing.” If you see a green “SoulCast Studio” teaser card with an Upgrade button instead, your account isn’t on GS Pro. Check Settings → GS Pro to confirm your subscription is active. If it just lapsed, previously attached recordings still play on your poems — you just can’t record new ones until you resubscribe. If you closed the teaser card with its X, it comes back after 30 days.
• “Microphone access was blocked.” Your browser refused or remembered an old “deny” choice for this site. Open your browser’s site permissions for GS Poetry (the padlock icon in the address bar is the usual entry point), switch microphone access on, then reload the page and try again.
• “We didn’t detect any sound in that recording.” The take captured silence end-to-end — usually because the wrong microphone was selected at the operating-system level, or because the mic was muted. Check your system audio settings, pick the right input, then record again. The studio shows this warning so you don’t save a silent take by mistake: discard it and record again.
• “Recording is over the 15 MB limit.” Long takes can outgrow the file size cap. Re-record a shorter version, or split a long piece across multiple poems and record one per piece.
• “Your browser does not support voice recording.” SoulCast needs a modern browser with microphone support — current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. If you’re on an old browser or a stripped-down in-app one (like the embedded browser inside some social apps), open GS Poetry in your regular browser instead.
• “My poem saved, but my voice reading could not attach.” If the network drops between save and audio upload, you’ll see “Poem saved, but your voice reading could not attach.” For a Public or Followers Only poem, GS Poetry takes you straight to its edit page. Otherwise, open the poem from My Poems and click/tap the pencil. Record again in the SoulCast Studio panel — this time it attaches directly. If the poem was only a voice reading, it stays a draft until the reading attaches.
• “Playback stopped working a while after the page loaded.” SoulCast refreshes its playback links automatically when they expire. If a reading ever fails to play even after a moment, refresh the poem page and press play again.

Where to go next

For the rest of the poem composer — including formatting, drafts, and visibility settings — see Drafts and saving your work, Tagging, categories, and forms, and Understanding poem visibility. To queue your poem (with its SoulCast reading) for a future release, see Scheduling a poem for later. For everything else that comes with GS Pro, head to GS Pro pricing.