ShortcakesRec

ShortcakesRec is a desktop app for macOS and Windows used by the people who film step-by-step video tutorials. It is the recording half of a two-part pipeline: a companion Premiere Pro panel picks up each finished take and builds the edit.

The problem#

A tutorial is made of hundreds of short steps, each with a script, a narrated voice-over and several takes. Recording to a voice-over by hand means juggling a teleprompter, a separate audio player and a folder of loosely named files that someone then has to upload and log. Takes go missing and editors lose time hunting for them.

What it does#

• Shows a queue of the steps assigned to you; click one to open a recording window for its next take.
• Generates the voice-over line by line with ElevenLabs, keeps the last three reads of each line, and plays it during recording with a waveform and word-by-word script highlighting.
• Records camera and mic or audio only, with three sound modes: mic only, voice-over baked in, or both as separate tracks.
• Pauses the recording and voice-over together, or just the voice-over, and keeps every stretch lined up.
• Non-destructive audio editing: trim, cut, gain and normalize.
• Names every file to the team's convention, uploads it in resumable chunks to a shared Google Drive, and links it back to the step in Airtable so editors see it right away.

How it's built#

A Tauri 2 app with a Rust core for native mic capture, FFmpeg encoding, Google sign-in and uploads, and a Svelte 5 interface designed to match Premiere Pro's own panels.