First, I want to say that I'm a big fan of Escape Pod and Pseudopod. My job is fundamentally cerebral but also involves long stretches of tedium, so I've really become dependent on these shows and podcast fiction as a whole to keep me focused on dreary tasks. As a result I've had the time to discover that there's a lot of equally dreary podcast fiction out there and I have to say you generally do excellent work and choose excellent stories to read, and I look forward to listening when I've grabbed your latest episode or two. I am often so impressed I'll send links to my friends, who typically ignore me but that's really because none of them listen to podcasts.
Thus, it's with no disrespect intended that I say that it seems like Escape Pod is missing the mark with editing lately. Please don't think I'm writing an angry rant because I want to crap all over the good work you guys do, this couldn't be further from the truth. But it's like nobody else is actually listening to these recordings between the time the reader sends it to editing and the listeners download it to enjoy. I can't pretend to say that I know what the pressures of podcasting on a weekly schedule are, or how the production process works, but I have futzed around with recording and editing my own silly stuff and I know it takes three and a half minutes tops to locate and excise something as neat as a false start (provided it's been noted already). Readers clap or snap their fingers (whatever that noise is?) to mark it in the waveform for easy reference during editing, right? (That's just a guess.)
I don't mean to fault the reader for not cleaning up his or her own work (Mur, this week) because I understand and appreciate that artists can and will skip right over mistakes because they've become too familiar with the work to see the big picture, and they're probably exhausted from staring at it, and I don't mean to fault the person putting the final edit together because their job is the bigger big picture. It's just.. aren't there any second-ears proof-listening the recorded segments before they go to the final edit? Is there not time for this to happen in the production process, or is it normally done, but sometimes whoever is supposed to listen to it doesn't get a chance before the deadline? Both of these things are somewhat reasonable sources of the problem, but I guess I still feel like it's more important to do something as well as you can than it is to do it on a regular schedule. Certainly, I can appreciate that from a production standpoint as well as a marketing standpoint (I guess you would call it) it's more important to keep to the schedule.
Isn't there some compromise, though? If there are second-listeners (or even just one) that occasionally can't get feedback done in time, is this maybe something you could do a narrow crowdsource on? Email the reader's file to a group of fifty or a hundred or n volunteers, someone is bound to be awake somewhere and have the time to give it a listen and email back a short list of noticed problems. It would be a little more involved but ultimately smoother maybe if you utilized some of the web-based bug tracking software that's out there. This is probably too much of a headache. I'm just trying to think of something.
Unsolicited advice from ignorant people can be really grating. I'm sorry for that. I know that I'm making a lot of assumptions about this works but it's because I think that it would be a lot less helpful if I instead just said "editing sux lol" and assumed that it's in your power to magically fix the problem but you don't want to or can't be bothered or whatever. I know you guys don't put all this effort in to release anything less than your best work.
Ultimately, I'd rather look foolish by putting forward a worthless suggestion than look foolish by pretending to be the first person to notice the problem. Thanks for the good work you do, and thanks for hearing me out.
