Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Today Apple made available the .Mac Podcast Pack to .Mac subscribers. This is exactly the kind of thing I’d like to see Apple release to .Mac members on a monthly basis. Along with lots of jingle loops, the Podcast Pack includes voiceover tidbits from Joe Cipriano, such as, “And now, here’s our host” and, “Welcome back to the podcast”, etc. That’s all well and good, and those blurbs are fun things to have, but it makes me fear something I’ve now dubbed Sean Hannity Syndrome.

A talk radio station I listen to airs Sean Hannity every day at 3:00. The show starts with deep-voiced announcer Scott Shannon saying something ridiculous like, “And now it time for the only light of truth in our troubled times. Sean Hannity is oooonnnnn the aiiiiiiir.” And sometimes there’s some bullshit about “the batttllllle for amuuuuurrrrricaaaa”. The show kills me. Anyway, after the booming, round, pear-shaped tones of this guy’s voice get done building things up to some impossible standard to meet, the nasaly, pinched voice of Sean Hannity comes on and says “unbelievealbe”, “on that”, and “you’re a great American” 850,000 times an hour. It’s a complete non-sequitr and a splash of auditory cold water.

I could use one of those Joe Cipriano clips to build me up to something I’m not, and immediately after his professional sounding (and professionally engineered) voice, comes my nerdy voice that can’t correctly pronounce the “s” sound through a cheap microphone. That’s good podcasting.

The .Mac Podcast Pack page has a QuickTime movie with examples of how to use the new loops to create nifty intros and whatever. Each of the demonstration intros is something like 30 seconds long with lots of rambling exposition and ridiculous buildup over music from the loops. And to me, that’s one of the bad things about amateur podcasts, or at least the ones I’ve heard. Unless your podcast is about music, it’s likely I don’t give a crap about whatever music is playing and you’re not making me happy by drawing out your intro with endless tunes. Put maybe 5-10 seconds of a ditty at the beginning of your podcast, say your name, say the name of the podcast, introduce your guest, and get right to the topic. This is essentially talk radio, and I’m listening because I want to hear what you have to say, so say it. Now.

Otherwise, the jingles and loops in the Podcast Pack are good, and I may use one or two in the future. There’s one new episode of my podcast in the dock and several more will be recorded in the coming week, so keep obsessively refreshing that RSS feed.