Hey Scott,

I'm loving the story, other than the gruesome nightmare in episode 3 or 4. The audio quality is very good. You've ironed out most of the problems. Either that, or the story is distracting me from noticing any issues. The only thing I'll say is that the last promo was far too loud relative to the rest of the cast. The first promo was only a little loud.

Here's a favorite line so far:

"God knows I've broken my share of laws. I still do everyday thanks to the RIAA."

I also like they way you tied Winston's well being to Matt's self-interest.

7th Son sounds interesting. What genre is it? Also, the fact that Michael Stackpole guest writes for it makes it very interesting to me. He's well-known in Skeptic circles. I haven't check out his fiction yet though.

Snark Infested Waters sounds right up your alley. I'll have to check them out as well.

Yeah that nightmare came out of my brain. You think you find it disturbing...

I noticed after I mixed everything down that the Obsidian promo was a bit loud. I'm relying on Garage Band to equalize stuff. I'll keep an eye on that.

Glad you liked Jose's line. He defintely sees things in shades of gray. I like him as a sort of foil for Matt. Matt can be dreadfully serious.

7th Son is Sci-fi. Cloning plays a central part and I think it's handled well. He avoids the usual pitfalls that sci-fi cloning falls into and comes up with plausible, if not "realistic" ways around some problems. Hutchins deals a lot with what it might be like to suddenly discover that you're a clone and that makes for some powerful emotions.

At one point the bad guy causes a country-wide blackout and Obsidian takes place during that time. I don't imagine that you'd have to listen to 7th Son to understand what's going on since the characters in this project aren't mentioned in the series, but I imagine there will be a little inside baseball. All of the writers involved seem really talented. I'm really familiar with about half of them, but based on that I think they're probably all on the same "level".

I've only listened to one ep of SIW, but so far so good.

Overall, I really like Jose's character. Then again, I've always been a sucker for family-before-self characters.

One way to avoid loudness variations with the promos is to do two things to your final recording. 1: Soft limit it then 2: normalize it. The first step will soften any volume peaks in your recording. The second step will scale your entire recording up so that the loudest part is almost exactly at 0 dBs. I almost guarantee that the promos do these steps. This will at least align your peak volumes.

Also, was that reverb/echo I heard when one of the characters was thinking?

Question about Jose/Matt, was the revelation that they're adopted brothers abrupt? I've considered mentioning it outright earlier.

Garage Band says that it normalizes it. Gues not.

Yes you heard the reverb. I don't have characters "thinking" like that very often, but I needed something to make it sound not like regualr dialog. Other casts use reverb for that purpose. Good, bad, indifferent?

No, I think you timed that revelation just right. It explains their previously expressed closeness. The reader knows that they have some sort of history, but it's left as a mini-mystery for a while. I love that kind of stuff. Were they in the military before? Did they have shared experience/interest in the occult? A few chapters later is a good time to resolve those kinds of mini-mysteries.

If you normalize before step one: soft limiting (compression would also work), it may not make the difference you were hopping for. It may be normalizing to one, very brief spike in volume. If that spike is near 0 dB, then normalization wouldn't do much. I'll download the audio file and take a look at it. Oh, and you have to normalize before adding the promos, of course.

The reverb was too subtle to notice. I only noticed it after he finished speaking. I haven't listened to many (any other than yours) podcast fiction, but I have listened to a lot of radio drama and books on tape (podcast fiction seems to seek out the middle ground between these two media). They never use reverb for that purpose. It's typically used for characters' thoughts when they are delirious, losing consciousness, or the like. The level of reverb reflects (pun intended) the level of delirium.

Most often, I've heard no effect used for internal monologues. Since internal thoughts will be rare in your podcast, I would recommend that route. It would work. I knew he was thinking to himself before I even noticed the effect. Context was (and in my opinion, should be) enough.

I have heard an EQ effect (set to a phone-like sound) for when a character is narrating in some radio dramas. That worked well.

Jose has an interesting past and you'll definitely see more of that coming up in about 3 or 4 more chapters.

Thanks for the technical sound tips. I'll give that a shot in episode 6 which I hope to have in the can by Thurs. Going camping with the kids this weekend, just me and them.

How about the length? I'm trying to stay between 20-30 minutes of story.