I wonder if in the future the fact that the story has a lot of effects and an alternate version is available could to be advertised in the intro, rather than have a large percentage of the listeners have a bad audio experience, then come to the forums to complain, and discover that there's an alternate after they've already had the negative experience. For that matter, what of all the listeners who don't read the forums or the blog? How will they know of the other option?
I don't begrudge Pseudopod's production team their decision to make a heavily produced episode - even though I do not enjoy listening to such episodes - but I think if they do so, they should assume that this will be a difficulty to a sizeable chunk of the listenership, and plan ahead as far as the communication goes.
from eytanz
Probably not - and here's why in ascending order:
THE GAME OF PSEUDOPOD!
1. despite the smooth and efficient image we project, Pseudopod is usually not (sometimes, though) pieced together in chronological order, due to the never-ending weekly schedule - Alasdair often records his intros in chunks and if he's far ahead of the curve, or we're behind the curve, his intros and outros are his reactions to "reading", not listening to the story (in this case, there was a very good chance the basic story audio wasn't even in when he recorded his intros). But what of patches? (Proceed to #2)
2. last minute patch recordings by Alasdair are difficult (not impossible) for the same reasons given above and the fact that Alasdair is way over in England. Graeme could do such things at the last minute but the poor guy has enough on his plate without me asking him to do more (But why last minute? - see #3 and avoid the Molasses Swamp, proceeding directly to Gumdrop Forest).
3. not all sound productions are created equal. Some are conceived at purchase, some at reader assignment and occasionally, as is this case, some very close to the end - so I often don't know If the story will have sound production or not - plans could fall through or not come out as envisioned (don't know what the audio version of that word would be - clairaudienced?). "Tjeng" went through 3 iterations - a deliberate alien reading request from Laurice, a fairly late in the game soundbed from me, and a last-minute vocal tweak from Graeme (requested by me and cleared by me - so blame me). So honestly, we usually don't know with enough head time to pull this off in the intros. (Community Chest!)
4. Complicating matters, the alternate mixes are NOT produced beforehand and are requested by me from Graeme if the listener demand seems to warrant it, the reasons being twofold - 1. see answer 2 above, re: "plate" (really, Graeme works very hard), 2. surprising as this may seem, it is difficult to predict what people will not like. For example:
"What Makes You Tick" - expected everyone to like it, everyone liked, one personal, negative email.
"The Line" - expected complaints, did not really manifest on forums, 2 negative personal emails about "unlistenability".
"Tippler's Bane" - stupidly, expected no problems, many complaints, rushed second version out.
"This Is Now" - figured the wind effects were safe but the clacking pool balls would annoy some, no negative reactions.
"Revelation of Cormorants" - worried that wave sounds would manifest as white noise to the average ear or car speaker, no major complaints although IIRC the forum had one minor comment and I received one personally
"The Drowner" - as this was the first full soundbed from beginning to end, and it moves through many tones, fully expected many complaints (but doing an alternate mix of a FOTB story would be even more work) - none came in that I specifically remember.
I believe this addresses your request above re: "assume" and "communication"
And finally... (Remove "Funnybone")
5. and this is kind of the crux of the matter - such an intro would ruin the surprise of the production (good or bad, your call) and is essentially redundant. Honestly, how much difference would a 5 second warning from Alasdair or Graeme at the end of the intro - as opposed to just starting the episode and finding out it has production that doesn't work for you - make? Would you actually turn it off right then and not listen to the first few minutes to see if it was that bone-grindingly awful? There wouldn't be any mention of an alternate version yet because we haven't gotten a reaction to justify making one yet. I don't imagine many people listen to the intros before starting out on a long-journey, only to be vexed in the middle of said journey by finding out the story has production - is it likely they would start checking intros for that reason if we put them in?
As for the questions posed about other listeners who don't read the forums or the blog and thus don't know about a potential alternate - well, a few thoughts come to mind. Perhaps they will be curious and attempt to discover what "went wrong" and check the story page (technically, we have no way of contacting those people if there just happened to be some kind of accidental flaw in the download anyway, so in that sense it's a "problem" that's existed since day one, just not about audio production in particular, and which I don't believe any of the pods have worried too much about). Perhaps they will chalk it up to dumb luck and move on. I guess we *could* put a note at the end of the next week's story outro, mentioning an alternate version of the previous week's story, but that runs into #1 and #2 again (although it wouldn't ruin any surprises by that point). ("D5!" "you sank my battleship!")
Negative experiences are sometimes unavoidable - you and a number of people did not like this episode's production and for that I apologize (as I say below "sorry, this time we just got a little too adventurous"), but there'll be a new one next week, and another after that, and another. And some of them will have audio production, but not very many because it's only applicable in some cases. But they will occur occasionally, just like stories without production that don't happen to be to your taste. Such is the game of LIFE ("Payday! A lawyer's salary, please!")
To address the secondary question from lisavilisa
Will it show up in the itunes feed?
and eytanz
Btw, I should point out that for those of us (like myself) who use itunes, if it's not in the feed, it's quite difficult to associate it with the podcast manually. So, having an alternate download that's not in the feed is rather annoying if I'm trying to keep my episodes organized.
Honestly, I don't know - I have no idea how the itunes feed accesses the Wordpress page, except that I toggle a few things for the itunes tagging. I guess the best way to answer that is with a question - did you get the alternate version of "Tippler's Bane" automatically in your feed? If not, then probably the answer is "no". I have no idea if itunes (and other pod-catching devices) "check" the page once a week or once an hour, if it would "see" a second audio file on the same story page or pass it over as already downloaded (it does have a different file name, but that might not make any difference to it).
I have no idea how to ask this question without it sounding indelicate and making myself sound stupid so I'll just ask it out of sheer ignorance - is it substantially more complicated for itunes users than just going to the story page and right clicking the download link, saving to your desktop and then dragging the file into your itunes folder? Because I could have done that 10 times in the time it's taken me to type this post.