Word boundary edits on timeline
D
David
The transcription often does not line up words correctly with the waveforms and it's very cumbersome to correct. 2 things would really help:
1) ability to move the connection point between words at once, so that the end of word 1 and start of word 2 are both adjusted at once - right now you can only edit one word at once
2) be able to drag a word on the timeline
Kevin from Descript
Hold cmd/ctrl to adjust! You can always drag word tabs for editing audio, but this is how you change aligment.
Autopilot
Merged in a post:
Critical workflow issue: lack of roll edit makes alignment extremely tedious
P
PL Enterprise User
I need to emphasize how incredibly frustrating the speech alignment workflow becomes when correcting phrases or full sentences whose timing is off.
When transcription alignment is incorrect — which happens often — and “Realign words in range” does not fix the issue (many times it doesn’t), users are forced into an extremely tedious manual process. To move a sentence or phrase down the timeline for proper sync, each individual word must be adjusted separately by their in/out handles.
And not by dragging or sliding.
Instead, every single word requires a two-step process: manually adjusting the start point and then the end point just to effectively “move” that word. Now multiply that by an entire sentence. Or several sentences. This is what users are forced to do today.
It is hard to overstate how slow, tedious, and frustrating this becomes in real-world editing. A task that should take seconds ends up taking minutes — repeatedly — purely because there is no roll-style edit or way to slide words or selections along the timeline.
Simply having a Roll edit option (ideally with a keyboard shortcut, like in Premiere) would dramatically improve this workflow. Even more impactful would be the ability to select one or more words and slide them together in the timeline to correct sync, instead of having to resize each word’s boundaries independently.
This issue stands out so sharply because Descript is otherwise such a strong and thoughtful product. But when alignment breaks, the current UI turns what should be a straightforward correction into an exhausting, error-prone process.
I’m sharing this because I genuinely love working in Descript — and this one missing capability creates an outsized amount of friction in daily use.
Thanks for listening, and for all the great work you’re doing.
Kevin from Descript
Hold cmd/ctrl to adjust! You can always drag word tabs for editing audio, but this is how you change aligment.
D
David
Kevin from Descript: Thanks Kevin, I am aware of this tool and use it often - what I mean in your example is it would be very helpful and much more efficient if there was also an option to move the boundary of both words at once - so in your example if when hovering over the connection between "the" and "deadline", it changed to an icon that let you move both boundaries simultaneously. This would cut in half the amount of time it takes to correct these situations. (The current method of adjusting each word individually should remain too of course.)
And the 2nd point I suggested is having a way to drag just the word tab without affecting the script - for example when a transcription error puts a whole word away from the actual audio, the fix requires moving the start and end points of the word tab individually. It would speed up the process of fixing transcription timing errors considerably.
Kevin from Descript
David: Thanks for the clarification!