What you need to know
- Clubhouse has added a bunch of new features meant to help creators make their rooms more discoverable and grow their audiences.
- The new update finally adds the ability to record a room and share it externally.
- Other capabilities include creating a 30-second shareable clip, a universal search feature, and spatial audio for Android.
Clubhouse announced a slew of new updates on Thursday, the majority of which address previous limitations with the platform in terms of making rooms more discoverable and helping creators expand their reach.
Its headline new feature is called Replays, which will allow creators and moderators to record a room and download it for sharing externally. You can choose to turn the feature on when setting up a room and recordings can be saved to your profile. Of course, rooms must be public for it to work.
This pits the platform even further against Twitter Spaces, which recently announced the availability of recordings hosted in the past 30 days. Twitter also beat Clubhouse to the punch earlier this year when it released Spaces for Android.
Clubhouse says Replays can help make it easier to "create great audio content, get discovered by others, and grow your audience over time." The feature will be tested over the coming weeks before it makes its way to everyone in October.
Another notable feature that's rolling out in beta to Clubhouse today is the ability to create clips that can be shared to outside platforms, assuming it's permitted in certain rooms. Listeners can use Clips to snip and share 30-second clips of public rooms. It will be enabled by default for public rooms, but creators can switch it off as well.
According to Clubhouse, the benefit is increased discoverability across the web. It will not, however, be available in private, social, or club rooms. To make a clip, simply tap on the scissor icon, which allows you to download the clip locally and share it on various social media platforms.
The app has also gained a universal search feature, allowing you to find people, clubs, live rooms, and upcoming events. Users could not previously search for rooms in Clubhouse. It's now available through the Explore tab on many of the best Android phones and iOS devices. In the future, it's expected to be moved into the hallway after Clubhouse gathers feedback from its community.
Finally, spatial audio is now rolling out to Android phones. The feature was first released to iOS in August, bringing an immersive surround sound experience to users.
