Help Getting started

Adding your own source

As well as the ready-made material on the Home page, you can practice with your own videos, podcasts, or audio files. This page covers how to add one, the quality choice you'll make, and how the automatic transcript works — including one important case where you'll want to do it manually.

Use sources you have the right to practice with. Shadow Edge fetches the source on your behalf for your own personal practice. Shadow Edge assumes no liability for any consequences resulting from infringement. Read our copyright policy →

Add a source

Click Add source (the + button).
On the URL tab, paste a link to a video or podcast — for example a YouTube or TED talk. A small preview appears so you know you've got the right one. (Or switch to the Upload file tab to use an audio file you already have.)
Choose a quality (see below), decide whether to transcribe automatically, then click Add.

Pick something short and clearly spoken to start — a minute or two of a single speaker is ideal.

Choosing a quality — what your plan allows

When you add a source, you choose what to download. The options available depend on your plan:

Free, Trial, and Silver — audio only. This is all you need for shadowing: you hear the speaker and practice each line.
Gold — audio, or video at 360p / 720p.
Platinum — audio, or video up to 1080p and higher.

Higher resolutions are shown but locked if your plan doesn't include them. For pronunciation practice, audio-only is perfectly enough — video mainly helps if you like to watch the speaker's mouth and expressions.

Letting Shadow Edge transcribe it

Leave Transcribe automatically switched on and Shadow Edge will write out what's said and split it into short practice lines for you. It also detects the language automatically by listening to the beginning of the media — so most of the time you don't have to tell it anything.

One important exception. The automatic language detection listens to the start of the audio. If your media begins in one language but the part you actually want to practice is mostly in another (for example, an English intro on a mostly-Japanese video), automatic detection can guess wrong and the transcript may fail.

In that case, don't use "Transcribe automatically." Instead, add the source first, then start the transcript manually and choose the correct language yourself. This avoids the failure and gets you an accurate transcript.

While it processes

You'll see a Transcribing label while Shadow Edge works; it usually takes well under a minute. When it's done, the label changes to Ready and you can open it and practice.

If a download fails because the site wants you to be signed in, that's when platform cookies come in — see What are platform cookies? Most sources don't need this.

Fixing the transcript

Automatic transcripts are usually good, but not always perfect — a line might be split in an odd place or a word misheard. For your own private sources, you can edit the segments to clean them up. This is a more advanced topic with a few moving parts, so we cover it in its own guide. (Detailed steps coming soon.)

Ready to practice once it's Ready? See Your first shadowing session.