Trim your recording, scrub the timeline, share in one click

You know the recording where the first eight seconds are you going "hang on, is it recording? Yep, ok, hi everyone"? Or the one where a child comes flying into the room right at the end? Until this morning your options were to keep it or record the whole thing again. Now you can just cut it off.

A bunch of changes went out today, all on the editing page you land on after you stop recording. Here's what's different.

I recorded a quick walkthrough of the lot (in Tape, obviously) if you'd rather watch than read:

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Give it a proper title before you send it

Hit the edit button next to the title and call it whatever you like. Click away or press the tick and it saves. This was already happening when you generated the content with AI, but now you can manually do it yourself.

You can actually scrub the video now

This is the one I'm quietly happiest about. Previously the video would play, but you couldn't skip to a different part of it, and the end of the timeline wasn't even shown. Now there's a slider, you can drag along it while the video is playing, and it keeps playing from wherever you drop it.

The reason it was broken is more interesting than "we forgot to build it". The browser's MediaRecorder writes WebM in streaming mode, which means the file comes out with no Cues index (the bit that maps a timestamp to a byte offset in the file) and no real duration written into the container. So the browser genuinely cannot seek, and asking the video how long it is gets you Infinity. I had been papering over that for months: timing recordings with a wall clock instead of reading the file, force-seeking to zero just to coax a thumbnail out, hardcoding a duration of 0 for cloud recordings. Every one of those was a workaround for the same root cause.

The fix is a quick remux of the container when you stop recording, no re-encode, so the file that lands in your browser is a properly indexed one with a real duration. That's what the "Processing" moment is doing now.

Trim the start and the end

Press edit on the video and you get a panel with handles for the start and the end. Drag them in, and the preview clamps to your selection so you can see exactly what you're about to send.

The way I use it: if I fluff the beginning, I don't stop and start over, I just pause, start again in the same recording, and cut the fluffed bit off at the end. Same for noise at the tail, or the aforementioned children.

Worth knowing: the trim is applied for real when you press upload, so the cut bits are gone from the uploaded file. Before that you can drag the handles around as much as you like and nothing is committed. The download button respects your trim too, so the local file matches what your viewers get.

AI summaries, same as before, nicer to look at

Down the bottom you can generate an AI summary, which reads the transcript from your audio track and gives you a title, a summary and the key points. Press "read all" to see the lot, and you can still copy it out as text or markdown. The behaviour hasn't changed, it just sits properly in the new layout now.

One button from recorded to link

Upload and share used to be two separate jobs: upload, wait, then find the share button. Plenty of people never realised sharing was there at all. Now it's one button, and the link comes back as soon as the recording exists rather than when the last byte lands, so the upload finishes in the background while you're already pasting the link into Slack. If someone opens it early they get a "still processing" message and it starts playing on its own when it's ready.

Go and break it

The whole preview screen is a two column layout now: prepare on one side, publish on the other. Record something, trim the daggy bits off, and tell me what's annoying about it. That last part is how the trim feature happened in the first place, someone asked.

Record something, it's free and you don't need an account.