Off Mic
Width is length
A segment is as wide as its episode is long. Ground Truth 07 takes a fifth of the strip because it takes a fifth of the feed, 1:12:04 of 5:28:15.
Four shows, one feed, drawn as one waveform. Scrub it to move.
Twelve minutes of nothing, on purpose
Hosted by Noor Haddad
We put twelve minutes of an empty hotel corridor on a podcast feed and waited. Forty one people wrote in. This is what they heard in it, and the one complaint we think was right.
Reading the strip
Four things the shape is telling you
The strip at the bottom of the screen is an instrument, not a texture. Every dimension of it means something, and nothing in it is decorative. Read this before the list below, it is quicker than guessing.
Height is loudness
The bars are each recording's own amplitude, sampled once every few seconds. A flat stretch is a quiet stretch. Off Mic 03 has a very flat middle for a reason.
Hairlines are chapters
The faint rules inside a segment are chapter starts. The brighter full height rules between segments are episode boundaries. The panel at the top of the page names the chapter you are standing in.
Teal is progress, amber is position
Teal fills what the playhead has passed, and marks which show you are on. Amber is only ever a position in time: the playhead, the two clocks, and an episode still asking for your attention.
The scrubber takes a keyboard
- Left, Right
- Step to the previous or next episode in the feed.
- Up, Down
- Move a minute at a time inside the episode you are on.
- Home, End
- Jump to the newest episode or the oldest.
- Drag, click
- Anywhere on the strip, with a mouse, a pen, or a finger.
The feed, in words
Six episodes, newest first
The same six the strip is drawn from, in the same order, left to right becomes top to bottom. Everything the scrubber can tell you is also written out here, permanently.
Second Draft
A rewrite that took nine years
Ground Truth
The map that got someone lost
Hold Music
Nobody agrees on the pause
Second Draft
We shipped it wrong on purpose
Hold Music