**The Apple Insider Podcast: Episode 160**

In this episode of the Apple Insider podcast, hosts VI and Neil were joined by special guest Will Ables, a comedian who has been open about the challenges he faced during the production of his album. The conversation began with Will discussing how he had lost faith in the comedy world after finding out that his show was no longer funny to him. However, instead of giving up, Will decided to take matters into his own hands and started working on a new project.

"I think for everyone's sake, I'll do my best," Will said, expressing his willingness to please his fans and make them laugh once again. He also discussed how he would like people to promote his album by going to his website or streaming it on platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Will emphasized the importance of streaming in terms of reaching a wider audience and getting his music exposed to new listeners.

Will also talked about his website, which he admits is "embarrassingly bad." He jokingly referred to it as a year-old project that still needs an update. Despite its flaws, Will encourages fans to visit his website if they want to learn more about him and his work. However, he also noted that his name can be easily found on music streaming platforms like iTunes, where he appears in the gospel or Christian rock genre.

In terms of audio production, Will discussed the challenges he faced during the creation of his album. He revealed that there were some "hiccups" along the way, but ultimately produced a high-quality recording that showcases his talent as a comedian and musician. Will's openness about his struggles with audio production is refreshing, as it gives listeners a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes process of creating music.

Will also expressed gratitude to Neil for going into detail about the audio production side of things. He appreciated Neil's willingness to discuss the technical aspects of recording and editing, which can be a complex and nuanced topic. Will jokingly referred to his editors as "heroes" for their work on the album, and he praised them for turning out such impressive results despite the challenges they faced.

The conversation also touched on the importance of streaming in the music industry. Will noted that while buying albums is still an option, streaming has become a more popular way for people to discover new music and artists. He encouraged listeners to check out his album on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, where it can be easily discovered through playlists.

Finally, Will expressed his appreciation for Neil's open conversation about the challenges he faced during the production of his album. Will noted that sometimes listening to a recording and then hearing the backstory behind its creation can change one's perspective on how good or bad the music sounds. He joked that if listeners had heard the first version of his song, they might have thought it sounded different than what they ultimately got.

The episode concluded with Neil thanking Will for joining them and discussing the challenges he faced during the production of his album. The hosts also encouraged listeners to reach out to them through email or social media, and to leave positive reviews on iTunes if they enjoy their podcast.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 160 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I need to catch my breath wow no I am doing great how are you I'm doing all right can't complain we talk a lot about these different kinds of things and we we get into the minutia of what Apple's doing and what their profits look like and and all these things and sometimes I like to take a step back and just hear from our listeners and hear about what their experiences are and what are the things they're confronting as they use this stuff and that's the sort of thing that we would do 10 years ago or 15 years ago as Apple users because we were a much smaller group of people right and and so we would be much more focused on forming a sense of community and helping each other out but it still happens from time to time and I'm always heartened to see it so if if there's a listener out there that wants to send us email or tweet it us and tell us about the kinds of things that you're seeing and confronting or or working through as you make your buying decisions you know do you get the iPhone 10 do you get the iPhone 8 plus do you go for a homepod what are the things that you're thinking about we'd love to talk with you about those things and we'd love to be able to talk about them on the podcast now along those lines I've got a letter from a listener a little bit later on but um let's get through the news so we ran a story that says that that apple is an incredible money-making machine you published this this morning this very morning that the Apple iPhone has captured 51% of global smartphone Revenue yeah um this is the latest uh data from strategy analytics so you can never really know 100% for sure because uh there's a lot of numbers being fudged around and uh different companies report different things so they do their best sort of estimates but their latest data shows that for the first time ever uh Apple captured more than 50% of Revenue so you're looking at them holding the Lion Share of the global smartphone industry well ahead of Samsung um and it's really mostly just a two horse race at this point but uh the market is bigger than ever and apple is a bigger share than ever of that market uh they are doing extremely well and really driving the average selling price of smartphones higher with the launch of the iPhone 10 last November uh you saw Apple's average selling price spike to almost $800 um and that really is kind of a GameChanger for the industry and so you know there's a question of how much blood can you get out of the stone in terms of growth um I think Apple realized very smartly um not too long ago that uh and growth is not necessarily where they're going to find in terms of unit sales uh they can push more into the higher end of the market for people that want those kind of devices and we've talked about this many times on the podast podcast is why you see them diversifying uh their uh lineup and appealing to all kinds of broad markets um from low end to high end but consumers clearly in terms of buying iPhones gravitate toward the higher end of the market and so that's where you're seeing these higher average selling prices and that's where you're seeing that Apple's share of Revenue continues to grow and so strategy analytics put out this data this week uh declaring Apple quote an incredible money-making machine um and it's pretty hard to dispute that yeah it's interesting you know as you mentioned there are two different ways to think about growth there's there's this growth in terms of Revenue or there's growth in terms of units in people's hands right you could be Samsung and have many more phones out there in people's hands but those phones have a lower average selling price and so Samsung makes less by Revenue right and and so Apple here is raising their price and placing value on on taking even more of that money and having that customer that's willing to spend more which is not a bad customer to have interesting I I was thinking about this as you were speaking that historically years ago before we had iPhones when it was just the Mac that people always complained that the Mac was too expensive and and Mac fans talked about how uh market share didn't matter because you know yes the Mac was a very low part of market share but that they had a quality machine that they had quality service from from a quality company and that all of those things mattered more than whether or not the Mac LED PC or not and here I'm seeing that kind of flipped around where the the instead of chasing the lower cost machine like the Mac Mini or bringing down the price of the Power Mac or bringing down the price of a PowerBook kind of thing which were things that Apple did over time to make them more accessible to more people here the price is going up does that make it less accessible to to as I said you know they have a very broad product lineup and so consumers that are buying the iPhone are clearly gravitating toward the high end but you can go get a very capable A9 powered iPhone SE with you know 60 or 32 gigs of storage and a 12 megapixel camera for $350 unlocked at the store so uh consumers you know with the average selling price at $800 are are gravitating toward those higher end models but you know it's never been more affordable than right now to get into the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone and an iPad so um it's a little different there I think um you know the news just came out this week that the Mac uh at least the MacBook line um moved up for the first time ever to the number four largest notebook lineup in the world uh that's the highest that Apple's ever been ranked so I mean the Mac is doing well obviously but um it's still only 9% of Apple's Revenue if you look at the numbers um in in the stories that we ran uh this week you know the Financial Focus stuff um you're looking at uh in in the next year um they are projected that the homepod the combination of homod Apple watch and airpods will be making more money than the Mac so you see where kind of the writing is on the wall and this really upsets a lot of old school Apple Fans because Apple at the end of the day is a business and they need to make money and they need to give consumers what they want and the Mac is less and less a part of that picture now that doesn't mean it's going away the Mac is still 9% of their revenue it's a for any other company they would kill to have those kind of numbers you know um but you see why the focus is so much on the iPhone you're looking at 63% of their revenue coming from one product lineup and so that's why they continue to diversify and expand to all price ranges that they could possibly get into because there's never been a more expensive iPhone than there is right now but it's never been more affordable to get an iPhone than it is right now too and you know with the expectations the iPhone SE is going to get an update in the next few months um they're clearly going to continue that multi-pronged approach to the market and I wish that they would more with the Mac in that respect you know the Mac Mini was originally introduced as the most affordable way to get into the Apple lineup right under $500 you could get the first Mac mini um and what what have they done with that in the last you know six seven years nothing uh and it's a shame you know it would be really cool to see a Mac Mini the size of a little Apple TV uh you know with Thunderbolt 3 and uh you know the ability connect wireless keyboard mouse and get an Apple built Monitor and you know get your get your whole setup done for on the cheap have a really great desktop system that's pretty capable um you know support for egpu that sort of stuff you could do all kinds of really neat stuff yeah and you know the Mac Mini when it came out was such a breakthrough in terms of getting people on board the Mac that hadn't even considered as an option before uh the idea that all you had to do was bring your keyboard video and mouse was was kind of a big deal and it turned out that it enabled businesses that hadn't even existed before like Mac Mini Colo where you could go ahead and collocate a server on a Mac Mini it led them to introduce a Mac Mini as a server product even it was a kind of really cool thing that they hadn't even thought would happen yeah and and it it would be nice and I know that they keep saying that they're going to revisit it um but it would be nice to see them revisit in Earnest because I think that you could see that share of Revenue grow from the 9% where it's at now I mean certainly it's never going to get to iPhone levels they're never going to sell that many Macs that's just that's the end of it uh but I think if they could revisit that and sell a quality $500 machine where you kind of bring your own keyboard mouse and monitor um I think that there's a market for that just as I think that the 12-in MacBook really needs to hit that sub $1,000 price point that the MacBook Air continues to linger around at um they really need to find a way to to get to those lower price points in addition to continuing to off higher offer higher uh price points you saw that with the new Macbook Pro as well the touch bar was just too expensive and so Apple has continued to expand uh the lineup and and offer the low-end 13-inch model without the touch bar to get to those lower price points and uh you know I think that that that's in Apple's best interest uh longterm for all of its product lineups there's you know there's talk of a homepod mini so to speak uh maybe coming down the pike later this year or next year I I don't know if that's actually going to happen but you you and I have talked about it that $350 for the homod uh while a great value for what it offers in comparison to the competition is still too high for a lot of people to buy into that space especially if they want to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google that are really going on the cheap end certainly not saying that Apple should be selling a $50 model but uh I think that if they got under the $200 price point that that would do them some good $100 is an impulse purchase it is you you can walk into Target or Walmart or any one of the stories stores around and drop $100 on something and not feel too bad about it if you make it $130 that gives some people pause to think for a moment but it's still possible 150 bucks is probably where they would price such a thing yeah you look at what they did with the Apple TV you know that used to be an Impulse buy $99 and they've gotten away from that um I don't know that that's done them any favors um I think that that may may have hurt their market share as you know Roku and and Fire TV and and chomecast have uh have really taken the low end of that market I'm very happy with my Apple TV I like it a lot but you know I thought that they were smart when they kept the uh previous generation model around for $80 or whatever it was and they kind of silently 69 $69 yeah they they kind of silently discontinued it and and uh I think that's a shame um and I would like to see just as they've done with the iPhone an expansion of options if you want the $200 um high-end really great 4K Apple TV have at it um and if you want to just get in and have the Apple TV experience something simple um you just need HD um and you just need the basics Netflix and access to your iTunes library and stuff I would love to see a Sub h00 sub $100 price point for that product and and unfortunately they abandoned it and that's something I'd like to see them you know refocus on and get back to not just with the iPhone but with all their products absolutely you know that was what was great about that $69 Apple TV third generation was that it's it's obviously did Netflix and Tulu but when Amazon Prime released Prime video for Apple TV for the fourth generation it also appeared on the third generation devices and so that device serves a lot of needs if you have an Amazon Prime account you're taken care of if you have Hulu you're taking care of if you have Netflix job done uh it it really addresses a pretty wide swath of the core TV streaming audience right there you know and it's got the the outliers like crackle and some of those things it's got HBO on it so it's it's a good strong device for people who don't need to have the tvos app store right exactly and for most people they just want access to Hulu and Netflix and whatever well we'll get back to that a little bit we're going to talk about homepod more in just a moment but I wanted to mention uh so Warren Buffett has been you his Philosophy for investing he said for years is that if he would be willing to own the whole company then he's happy to own shares of it if he's not willing to own the whole company doesn't own shares of it right and he has just raised his stake in apple to uh 1653 million shares nice to be rich sorry I'm a little staggered by that um he he's dropped about 95 4.5% of their IBM hings and they they still have obviously some of those those IBM Holdings they got 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM M but uh they um no not 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM 4.5% remaining of their Holdings of IBM but yeah they have about 27.7 billion dollar worth of Apple as of trading yesterday yeah it's something um there's a lot there's a lot of uh volatility with apple lately and and the market in general obviously um there are a lot of investors who are focused on Apple as a growth stock and they obviously cannot grow forever um even though they continue to make money hand over fist so as we've talked about here many times uh Wall Street is kind of a sideshow joke when it comes to actually investing in companies for what they're worth as opposed to what the market wants so uh you know there are smarter people than me that make money on the market um I I don't invest in any specific tech stocks or anything like that um I'm just an observer uh but you know obviously Warren Buffett is uh earned his place as one of the respected guys on Wall Street um and he seems to know what he's talking about so I'm sure that makes feel in investors feel a little more confident um in times of volatility when uh he buys in so heavily to Apple yeah and you know you can see who how Apple's established their place in the market you can see who their competitors are and you can see how close or far their competitors are in terms of chasing them so knowing all those things and knowing a little bit about where Apple's trying to go in the future should tell you whether or not this is kind of an that Mak sense and for him it obviously is one that makes sense let's get to the main event let's talk homepod so the the the lead into this is before we talk about the reviews and the other things Apple watch airpods and homepod um they're predicted to rake in about 22 billion in Revenue by 2019 yeah that's what I was saying they're probably soon going to be bigger than the Mac um I I don't think that the homep Pod is going to be the biggest chunk of that the expectation is that the Apple watch will be um higher volume higher margin but the airpods are a big part of that too but homepod will contribute and the reason all those are lumped together is because Apple doesn't give specific sales figures for those devices they have historically given specific sales for the iPhone iPad Mac um but they do not give specific sales for iPods any longer uh Beats headphones airpods that sort of stuff so it's all lumped into a category called other products um and if you watch Apple's uh numbers every quarter that other products continues to grow uh and I think the biggest piece of that pie is the Apple watch and continues to do very well but certainly homepod will be a contributor going forward absolutely I mean the Apple watch is set to swallow up all of the Swiss watchmaking industry as a whole it's going to be bigger in terms of numbers than Swiss watches yeah yeah it's it's pretty impressive that they can get that many people to spend that much money on a watch um you know I would be curious to see uh what the average selling price is what models people are going for how many people are getting the the you know uh old series one model that continues to be sold um at a discount price or uh you know who's opting for the newer model with LTE that sort of stuff so um I I don't know what they're selling at um certainly they came in pretty aggressive with the high-end edition gold models you know up to $155,000 and then quickly scrapped that and went for the ceramic ones but I think they've been feeling their way around the market and seeing what's what works and what does not yeah all right this is the main event the main event is your homepod review yes tell me about it uh so I came away of of two minds about the homepod and um you know obviously when you write for an Apple website uh people are going to be very upset when you don't love everything that Apple does I'm outraged we are obviously an independent website and our duty is to our Readers first foremost but not just the most loyal Apple Fans but also people that just are curious about certain products and whether it's right for them and so I try to write my reviews with that in mind but also to be honest about you know how I feel um and how it fits into my lifestyle and so it's difficult because I don't like to make myself the centerpiece of a review I don't like to talk much about myself I'd rather just be kind of anonymous and just kind of put it out there and and give an honest assessment and be done with it I I never got into this business in an attemp to be a personality I can assure you of that um so anyhow but the problem with this product was the way that I listen to music and the way that I use speakers and AirPlay and Siri is so specific to me and the things that appeal to me about the homepod and the things that I don't care about with the homepod um weigh so much on my thoughts about the product that uh I had to really get into that personal side of what homepod is for me what I want it to be how I use it where I see it going Etc um and so this is one of the more personal reviews that I've written just because I think that that weighs so much and I and I hope that when somebody reads it you know they're not dwelling so much on on my taste in music or anything else really uh they're just focused on whether or not my take on it is applicable to them because I think some people are going to get a homep pod and absolutely hate it and some people are going to get a homep pod and just adore it and they may have very use cases than the other person that lead to that you know somebody looking for a personal assistant that's going to give them the weather and tell them jokes and stuff like that may not be as happy with the homepod as somebody who just wants a really easy to use plug-and-play quality sounding speaker so it's a it's a complicated product and in much the same way you know that the the Apple watch um recently took some time to find its footing as for what its strengths were and why you would want one um I think that there's going to be some growing pains with the homep Pod and if you know what you're getting uh and you really want a a quality speaker that's just easy and you can just put it in a room and just use it and it sounds great I think you'll be very happy with the homepod uh but if you're looking for something a little smarter a little more advanced um or even a little more technical um you're you're probably going to be lacking on this and may want to wait uh until those inevitable future software updates come and and add functionality to this which I think is just assume assumed to be in the works at this point but you know I came away of two minds about the product I love it for its design its sound its Simplicity um and I hate it for its Reliance on Siri I just absolutely find it to be a frustrating experience a lot of the time okay so I ended up giving it 3.5 out of five in the end how how are you on Apple music because it also is somewhat relied on Apple music I don't use apple music but I do use iTunes match so um I'm about as aside from an Apple music subscription and a beats one listening habit I'm about as Allin as you can get on the Apple ecosystem I buy most of my albums from iTunes when I buy digitally sometimes I'll buy from other sources like U you know band camp or something like that um or I buy a lot of vinyl and I get digital download codes and then I'll upload the digital copy to my iTunes match account so I don't have access to all music so there are certain weird things like if you say Hey you know who play some music um it'll just start playing all of your music as opposed to if you have an app music account then it starts playing your favorites or things that it thinks are your favorites I don't know why it can't do that with iTunes Match or just an iCloud music library that seems odd to me and then another thing that somebody in the comments uh said worked for them but did not work for me was I kept trying to have the homepod play the latest album by an artist so I don't know the names of albums a lot of times and I like to listen to albums from start to finish I don't want to just listen to random songs from an artist um I don't want to listen to a playlist I want to listen to an album start to finish the way that the artist intended but you know I listen to a lot of music and and I can remember artist names but I can't remember the name of an album I don't know what the name of the album is it's just kind of like I'll scroll through my music library and I'll recognize the art and go yeah that one and then play it so I found myself trying to talk to the homepod and say play the latest album by and it turns out that command just doesn't work and I don't know why um and then somebody in the comments said that they have apple music and it works fine for them so I guess if you pay Apple $10 a month and you can get better Siri function I don't know all my albums have years on them you know even then it should just default to the one that was most recently added to the library it has stamps on all these files so I can't I can't imagine why it doesn't work but to me stuff like that is so basic and so simple that it's frustrating when it doesn't work look we we know that there are a number of Siri fails we know that Siri doesn't get the right answer whether it's answers that it needs to search the web for or answers that it should just know locally based on your music collection Siri's got problems they have to address this a bunch of people in the in the comments on my review were angry and said that I should have given the product two scores one as a speaker and a music listening device and the other one as a personal assistant and these people are inevitably Apple Fans who want the product viewed in the way that is favorable to the product well no no they want the product viewed in the way that apple is pitching the product and apple is pitching the product as a fantastic Quality Music speaker first and by the way it's also got assistant and here's the problem with that logic that's wrong here's the problem with that logic you the primary way of interacting with a device is by talking to Siri so by saying that you have to rule out the smart functions of it is not fair because even if I were to ignore the fact that it can't do basic things like set two timers or really talk to my phone in a meaningful way or communicate with third party apps I still have to talk to the stupid thing to get it to play music unless I want to pull out my phone and it doesn't understand me like half the time and part of it and this is again why I got kind of personal in the review because part of it may be that I listen to a lot of lesser known and obscure artists having said that the stuff is not really that hard to to pronounce or figure out and so you know I was doing things like play the latest album by and then say it would just play all the songs by okay fine that that works but then I had the name of the album wrong on one case so I was uh looking to play an album the latest album by a band called The go team and so I was telling the hod uh play the latest album and just said okay playing all songs mine then none of them were the latest album okay fine so I'll try again so I was trying to remember the name of the album without pulling out my phone and I said uh Play Mayday by the go team and the First Choice was uh I think 18 Visions which is like a very loud hardcore band which is not nearly the same genre even close it doesn't even sound like what I was requesting mayday by the go team somehow turned into 18 Visions so so it misheard you in that case and then I asked again a second time um to play Mayday by the go team and it said uh that uh it was playing uh tame and paa as an artist um not even close again and then so I pulled out my phone and it turned out that the the problem was me I I was saying the wrong album name I was saying uh Mayday when in fact the first song on the album is called Mayday and the album name is actually semi Circle um but but here's the thing is that it should know they should have thought of the idea that you are placing the importance on the artist name and So within the priority of the artist name it should then find things that match or close as opposed to placing the priority on the first search term which was Mayday I I don't know where it got those connections I don't know you know and and the thing is it it it seems Siri seems more aggressive on the homep Pod so it used to be that it would say um she's assertive now it it would say I don't I don't know or I can't find that but now it just goes well this is probably close enough and then just throws something out there so I was trying to I would argue that that's the right answer and I'll tell you why I think that if you put this product out there in the world and you shipped it out and you gave it to reviewers and you put it in people's hands and their experience was comprised of I don't know or would you like to search the web or I can't find that or any of these these definitely not encouraging statements right that that would be the joke on Saturday Night Live that would be everyone's impression that Siri is a smart speaker who doesn't know anything right so here they've decided to shortcircuit that to prevent that from happening by simply they've asked for music We don't know what music but we're going to play something and they do it so that you don't get this Siri doesn't know anything response paried everywhere you know um like my wife came home from work last week and I just sit up the home pot it was Friday and she's like how does it work and so I put out a request and I I wanted to play a new album that I just got from a band that I saw a few weeks ago called fruit and flowers so I put in a request for that and it said okay playing LCD sound system and it's like these don't even sound alike like they're not even close I didn't and it wasn't even I didn't even ask for an album I just asked for the artist name because I only have one album by them and it just it just it's not even close like not even in the same ballpark I don't I don't know where it comes up with these conclusions uh where these artist names are are being mixed up and they really need to have some sort of a way to train it to understand um uh like I have a artist called laloo that I'm seeing this weekend and I wanted to listen to them the other day and if I spell it out and I say play artist L A LZ it goes okay playing laoo but if I say Play laoo It's doesn't understand it tries to play something else every single time it it does not understand that and it's like you you know how to pronounce it because I hear you say it back to me I know that we're pronouncing it the same way um so first of all it gave a bad demonstration for your wife yeah which not not a fantastic first impression there and second of all so my my experience in my house is if I have something set up and it fails either in the demonstration or in the first time that someone on the house besides me tries to use it that that is it no one else tries to use these things ever again yeah you get one shot is that the same thing with your wife is that is that also true in your house she hasn't really used it very much um I don't know how much of that is because she um I don't know if that's because she wasn't involved in the setup process or or what but I mean it's only been a week I imagine that you know it'll be integrated more into our life as we go um I've been using it a lot for homekit which is great but I know the specific commands that it wants for homekit and everything is easily pronounced right is another thing that I am disappointed in with homekit and Siri is that if I tell it that I want to turn if I have one smart door lock and I've named it door I should be able to say open the front door and it should also understand that that might be the same thing right having to know the exact names of the devices throughout your house is is kind of a burden and it doesn't help you the idea is that these smart assistants are supposed to be able to take the imprecise language input and handle it and by requiring specific naming like that it falls apart the funniest uh example was uh and you waited on the comments on this too because internet commenters don't get me wrong I love everybody that reads Apple Insider and I love the passion and enthusiasm that people have when they when they come to the comment section no I really do HA them no I I genuinely do and I enjoy engaging the comments but what people don't understand is sometimes when we go in and we try to clean up the comments or we try to fix it uh there are certain people that come in and just derail the discussion and it just goes down a road to talking about things that don't really matter they bring they bring in a flaming bag and leave it there in the comment section for everyone to look at and the worst part is when it's one of the first comments on the article it's the first thing everybody sees and if you come to the comments and don't comment yourself you just read them and you just see it immediately get derailed you're like oh jeez you know it's like there's no intelligent discussion being had you walk away you go elsewhere and so in my review and I wrote many words about the homepod and one sentence just to laugh about how silly Siri can be sometimes um I was trying to play a band called patio and I played the band and Siri understood and played the band but the problem was uh Siri tells you what she's about to play before it starts playing and so she goes okayy Siri play artist patio okay I'm playing patio yeah she says I've just given away a joke I'm sorry I'm playing I'm playing patio not patio patio and it's like I've never heard that pronounced that way uh somebody in the comments had to weigh in and say that that's the way that it's apparently pronounced in Spanish even though my wife speaks Spanish as her first language and said that that's not entirely accurate because it has a different number of syllables in Spanish neither here nor there uh the the fact of the matter is there should be some sort of way for Siri to learn and some sort of option for you to say okay you're saying that wrong or you're hearing me wrong or I want you to learn this phrase there needs to be some sort of programmable custom way of saying get this right I know they do it with names and stuff on your contacts on that's also inconvenient right that's also and and also fraught with problems I mean if you could say Hey Siri pronounce patio patio and it would get it and it would say okay I'm learning that now that would be fine because I have a friend whose name is AAL mhm and if you try and and tell Siri to dial a all she doesn't get it and if she does slightly understand it at all she pronounces it eel yeah well I don't want to call an eel I don't need an electric eel I want to call my friend AAL and I have tried to put it in phonetically I have tried to create a nickname I have tried to sort this thing out and um in in the end I've just given him an American sounding name that I know is his name when I want to call him which is dumb but Siri doesn't know how to pronounce it yeah and never will and and that's what's so frustrating um you know I another one I was there was a mashup album I tried to play called wugazi It's a combination of the wuang clan and fugazi and the first time it tried to play t and Paula I guess it likes to play that a lot and then the second time it tried to play songs by the artist fugazi which I understand I mean they sound very similar at that point they're just one letter off um but it it's still there should be a way for me to say no no no I want you to learn this band name so that in the future I can easily play it there's got to be some sort of a training thing added to it because everybody's going to have their own it's it's there's no way that Apple could possibly program every artist that's ever existed for everybody's obscure music libraries you know they can go in and manually make sure it understands Lady Gaga but I have I have the solution Neil yeah just as Apple gave us the You2 album yeah apple can give us Eddie Q's iTunes library oh okay and we can just happily everyone listen to the things that edq list yeah yeah great can't wait and then Siri will understand every one of them it'll be perfect it's going to be lots of Cold Play on there I'm kind of okay with that are you cold play is terrible stop it please good Lord no no thank you uh oh fine no and again I don't want this to devolve into you know artists that you listen to who has more street cred when it comes to music or whatever the simple fact of the matter is you have to use Siri to interact with this thing in a meaningful way and I have found myself using my phone to select artists to then use the homepod as an airplay speaker rather than than speaking to the homepod I find myself speaking to it more for homekit controls and not speaking to it for music controls because I don't know the name of the albums and when I try to guess the name of the album I can't get it right and even when I do know the name of the album I can't get it to work and so there's just too many points of failure at this point and so it's really disingenuous to say you should review this product with different scores for different functionality because you could say that about any of Apple's products you know the first iPhone should have been given three scores one is a internet Communicator one is a telephone and and one as a as a widescreen iPod you know like come on just because a product does multiple things doesn't mean that it should be graded on a curve on certain parts of that it's a great speaker it's a great simple speaker it sounds very good um it's not going to be the best sounding speaker you've ever heard but it's $350 for something that you can just put in your house and have it fill the room and sound fantastic so you know so here here's my concern I am kind of concerned by the that this thing was released too early and and I say that based on the Siri interaction and control part of it yeah and you know the old Apple and and I hate to say it but you know if Steve were still around no but the old Apple would have told us repeatedly that they don't release things until they're ready and well how old is Siri now old enough to know better that's the point old enough to be sent to a room at you can't really say you can't really say that they don't release it till it's ready because Siri's been around a long time and still has all these problems yeah and and that's a problem because of Apple's data collection policies and the fact that they put the consumer first and so the thing that is in many ways Apple's greatest strength and the reason that I'm willing to put a homep in my house and not an Amazon Echo is ironically the thing that holds them back because yes but I don't as a consumer I don't have to care why it's not working it's just freaking not working absolutely so I I want to move quickly to a reader review of homep we were sent an email and you you you saw this email this is from one of our listeners and I really like this guy a lot and so he starts off by saying that he's an Apple guy through and through he has been since ' 87 he is returning his homepod and he is highly disappointed which are are sharp words highly disappointed we don't take that lightly it sounds fantastic it's outstanding but the implementation is awful now he he knew it was an Apple device going into it he knew there was no way to get external audio into the device other than over AirPlay and things like that got over that uh he's got an Apple TV based living room this is fine but he's having difficulty with the way that iOS handles AirPlay if you're using an application that uses the video or the TV app the iOS device thinks that you're moving both the audio and the video to the airpod which means you get the audio coming through the speaker but a black screen with an AirPlay symbol which is not optimal at all and you know it it seems like they ought to be able to do the kind of thing that an Apple that a Google chomecast does where you can tell a chomecast to do something on the TV and it goes ahead and opens it on the TV so you ought to be able to have the audio route to the airpod and the video route to an Apple TV for example I mean it needs to tie more into the ecosystem in general you know we've talked about this before I think we talked about last week there's no reason that I can't say you know send directions to this place to my phone and then I walk out the door and then 10 minutes later I pull out my phone and I can see where I'm going you know like well and they already do that with the maps application on Mac OS if you're going ahead and and locating directions on Mac OS Maps it sends it to your pH and all this stuff is connected you know there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to say I want to watch something on TV have it dim the lights have it turn on the Apple TV the Apple TV is HDMI CEC connected so it can turn on your TV and switch it to the right input and then you know it should just be able to load the right app and and you know the TV app integrates with things like Netflix and whatever if I say I want to watch stranger things the latest episode bam pop it up hul I want to watch Hulu I want to whatever wait TV app does Netflix well it does like it does kind of a limited TV app does TV app does Hulu video HB a few it does a limited Netflix integration but even still like Netflix has to get on it does but but the fact that they have all these pieces in place they just haven't like put the puzzle together you know um and you can see where it's going and you can see where it's going to be really cool where you can do all those things and all the platforms talk to one another and it's really just um seamless you don't think about this is my Apple TV this is my homepod this is my phone whatever um all the devices talk to one another that that's where it's going we're just not there yet all right point two of of uh our listener letter it cannot be used to place phone calls it can be a speaker phone but you have to place or answer the call on your phone and then route it to the homep you and I did a speaker phone call with it last week that's literally the only time I used it and it was so insignificant to me that I didn't even mention in the review I I I just don't care okay but when we did that call um I called you from bone conducting headphones did you then have to I was using bone conducting headphones which which sounded great to my the side of my head I can't say sounded great to my ears because they were't in my ears but um you know we were confirming that the microphone wasn't amazing and did you when you answer the call have to Route it to the IP I change the audio Source just like you would you know yeah with any other exit with any other headset okay but you know if you have the airpods you don't have to do you do sometimes I mean it'll pop up and say what what audio Source do you want okay but if you can you but you can use have the airpods and place the call directly over them so the airpods are a little bit better for placing phone calls than the homepod is I mean I guess if you talk I'm just trying to clarify and make sure that we're we're agreeing with our listener letter here yeah um I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next point this this is one that that is also just one of these details right uh it works with iTunes on the Mac but he could not set it as a destination for all system audio I don't know why he couldn't I can okay so you can you uh you what you option click on the speaker at the top of set your okay right so if you have air foil as a third party thing on your your Mac you can go ahead and do that yep um and that's how I did the record player tip too now if I'm in system preferences sound and the output see regular airpl speakers I'm showing headphones I see regular air play speakers but I don't see the homod okay so you need to have air foil in order to be able to yeah I don't know why it's blocked out because I have 1 two three four five different uh AirPlay options on my Mac right now so my homepod is technically the sixth uh but I don't see that as a system output option okay I'm looking at my list I have two Apple TVs and a speaker that I was not fully aware was actually an airplace speaker to be honest I'm kind of surprised to see that there I have a I have a jam voice which is a Amazon Alexa enabled Bluetooth Wi-Fi portable speaker device and so I've always used that as as a portable Bluetooth speaker and also an Amazon Alexa device but it's showing up here in system preferences as an AirPlay device which pretty Co is totally wild to me I had no idea literally just discovered now so I I would say that three is mostly true for him because you know you expect to be able to do that out of the box and airplan speakers do that out of the box this one does not so air foil is required as a third party thing to make that work um so his his conclusion was that he felt like it was a speaker for Apple TV only and that the iOS implementation and the implementation in TV us were you know he felt the TV tvos implementation was complete and functional the iOS implementation was Half Baked and Mac OS was was not baked at all it's not as a home theater speaker anyhow so who cares if it'll connect to your Apple TV well I mean if you want really good sound out of it it's it's not a bad if you're watching TV you want distinct channels anyhow so I mean film has had stere film and television have had stereo sound for a very long time and at the base you want at least you know 2.1 sound for a good quality but you know for like for example my setup is 5.1 sound and you can go as high as like 9.2 sound now two so you know I I have a 7.2 receiver and the the honest truth is I only have 2.1 connected I have a a 7.2 receiver and I have 5.1 connected so I I was going to do the rear channels and and add a center channel to it and I was getting ready to do it and my wife just said don't bother and the truth is 2.1 Serv fine but you you do want distinct channels left and right when you're watching television um you know even a soundbar stretches the distance to have some space between them um you know I I so how is homepod at at beam forming to get some what stereo separation it's not stereo separation at all it's really just uh it's sound that fills the room but when you have something that's small you can't have true stereo sound you won't be able to do that until they allow that capability with a future software update and airpl 2 officially launches um but there was a guy uh I got to give a shout out in the comments um uh he goes by the name dick applebomb um and he uh used air foil and then created uh he has dual air foil apps playing Stereo One balanced all left the other all right used with two homepods so he's actually getting right now true stereo sound out of two homepods I thought that was really cool yeah it is um right so I am cool with this I'm not going to give away our our listener's full name because I didn't ask permission if I could talk about it but uh I I I really want to thank this listener for writing in and you know I I know you're out there and I I want to thank you again cuz this has been and we love having those different opinions and that goes again back to my review and why I like the homepod so much I mean we spent so much time here complaining about Siri but the truth is I love my homepod and the reason that I love it so much is because I love listening to music I love having good sound I love the Simplicity of it and I am potentially the world's biggest home or uh AirPlay fan I have been using AirPlay for many years um I really enjoy it and so to have uh an an expansion of the airplay lineup um and to have a new way and knowing that AirPlay 2 is coming uh I'm very excited for the future potential that my my donon receiver does AirPlay I have AirPlay speakers throughout my house but uh I quickly see my homepod becoming my go-to airplay speaker for a lot of reasons um including the fact that I assume that Siri is going to get better and I'll be able to talk to it and just it'll work and then I can use it with homekit and say you know play music in the kitchen play music in the bedroom whatever I'm excited about all that and I love I want to have a home pod in every room in my house I want to have multiple ones in one room uh it just it needs to get better it's just not it's a great product for an Enthusiast like me who is pretty much the quintessential target market for this device uh but uh it still has a lot of room to grow but thankfully with the A8 chip in it it really does have that room to grow it has the processing capability that I could see you know three years from now being a very different product than it is at launch yeah I I have to tell you I for years I pronounced the name of your receiver as Denon and and you've pronounced it as denan yeah I have no idea well I figured it out okay the the brand came from a merger of Deni ano mhm and so Den on is is the sort of correct pronunciation or Den so it's it's not denan but it's denki and ano so Den on Den on okay is where we go with that good to know well they make a great receiver that I'm praying when Apple releases AirPlay 2 is going to get updated to airpl 2 and then uh will presumably integrate with homekit and then I can tell it to uh play music in my living room and I'm very excited about that so what kind of furniture do you have your home pot on a wooden table and it does not have a ring on it okay now why would it have a ring on it the material that Apple used on the bottom where the subwoofer sound comes out uh can have a chemical reaction with some uh Furniture fin polish yeah um and uh unfortunately it leaves a ring uh there were some other articles that came out this week that showed that the Sonos one does the same thing and leaves a ring I guess it's just a standard material the same silicone material yeah it's unfortunate and if it messes up your table and and annoys your wife uh that's really unfortunate um it's an oversight by Apple I don't see this as being that big of a deal put a coaster under it I mean who cares um in other news Neil Hughes and I will be kick launching our Kickstarter for homepod coasters I I I don't think that this is a particularly big deal um but if it messed up your table uh you might be upset about that and I understand that but Apple's advice is to move it and polish it and put it on something so if you're putting it on a wood table and you're worried about it uh you know put a place mat under it you'll be all right right and the reason that they used this material is because they want to dampen vibrations they don't want the speaker to be buzzing on top of the furniture they want to be dampened and so you need to use some kind of material that will dampen vibrations and silicone is a reasonably good choice for that correct except when it leaves marks on your furniture so that's that's the question and uh you know the right answer is to clean the surface with the furniture manufacturer's recommendation recommended cleaning process and then it should be okay some of the testers that tried it so that didn't really clean it up very much and they're going to have to resand their table which is terrible I'm not going to I'm not going to before you sand a finish I would be tempted to polish a finish and not polish it with something like a you know a Johnson wax furniture polish kind of thing but to polish it with a um with a light car polish like a scratch removing car polish because that is a very light abrasive that will just take off the top surface without damaging the Finish below it and so you know you can um you can polish something up and and not have to sand it all mhm you know sanding and refinishing is annoying now where I would say to be careful with that is if you have an open grain wood then the Polish fills the Grain and you have a problem with polishing the grain you got to get out but it it's um you know use your best judgment uh govern yourselves accordingly but I would say do less rather than more and taking sandpaper to Wood means you've got to refinish the whole thing which can be kind of a pain right and and it's a shame that anybody has to do this in the first place absolutely so I can see why people would be upset or frustrated about this it does not affect me and I can't imagine it's going to affect a lot of people mine has been sitting on a wood table since day one um and I flipped it over once this came out to see if there were any stains there are not all is good yeah now Consumer Reports also gave their review of homepod they did it's a fact they did and they have a history of giving glowing reviews to Apple products they don't they I mean they they they have loved no I'm sorry got to take that back they they haven't loved they used their web page to get a lot of attention over the iPhone 4 and aate they have talked at length about the 2016 MacBook Pro where they used a test for battery performance that that made them withdraw the recommendation for the laptop and they also uh did dramatic testing for the iPhone 10 and found all sorts of unique ways to damage it as a part of their review and they went ahead and they wrote up and issued their Consumer Reports homepod review very quickly after they got the units same day and and they gave glowing reviews to the home Max and the Sonos one they said that the homepod sounded worse than the other two and that flew in contrast to basically every impression that was on the internet and here's the thing Consumer Reports is certainly entitled to their opinion I have no problem with them saying that the Google home Max is a better speaker um but you have to take it all in context uh they published their Impressions declaring quite definitively in a headline that the home Max sounds better than the homepod and the Sonos one sounds better than the homepod after a day of testing it okay um but again back in 2010 they were the instigators of the so-called antenna gate controversy with the iPhone 4 a couple years ago when the MacBook Pro came out they declared that it had poor battery life only 4 hours and it turned out that they had a developer setting enabled in Safari that was ruining the battery life that they went out of their way to flip on um and then like you said the iPhone 10 tumble test they simulated falling down like 50 flights of stairs or something and it's like what like nobody's phone is going through this kind of situation anyhow they have a history of kind of stirring the pot when it comes to Apple products and they also ially will wait you know a month or two after testing something to issue a definitive statement and this time they did something the day of and so all those factors combined led to uh Mike worthley uh who's an editor with apple Insider writing an editorial and I don't want to speak too much on his behalf because it's his editorial but um just to summarize his point uh you know Consumer Reports is a history of uh riling up Apple Fans um people that are following closely that are into Apple products don't necessarily take Consumer Reports too seriously because of uh the antenna gate and everything else that they've done over the years and on top of that uh they usually wait a while and do extensive testing before coming up with a definitive conclusion but this time they on the same day ranked the Google home Max as inferior or as superior to the homod so all that led Mike to write an editorial just pointing out all these facts and saying you know you know what's going on here I want to point out so they also ranked Sonos one as Superior to homepod right John McFarland who is the found of Sonos he he's retired from his CEO role now but but he did that in in last spring mhm he found that one Sonos one against one homepod the homepod was Superior so when the founder of Sonos tells you that the homepod is the better product one for one well it costs $150 more so I mean no no but I mean the the the qual there's something to be said for this right yeah so we when after Mike published this after we published this M Consumer Reports responded on Twitter no they they issued a press release go D tell I'm rubbing my hands together listeners yeah Consumer Reports issued a press release uh disagreeing with Mike's editorial saying that uh uh that they were disappointed um and accusing um Apple Insider and and Mike specifically of not giving them an opportunity to comment before it ran the editorial now uh Mike that's also not true Mike Works directly for me and he took me through the process process he went to their website they have a form there where they say all press inquiries should go through he filled out the form he put a return email address of news at Apple insider.com which is how you reach us uh and did not get a response uh for about 12 hours before we hit the publish button on that on that editorial so um I commented just uh uh responded back to Consumer Reports and just said uh you know our editor Mike worthley did actually request comment before this editorial went live um and uh there is a very clear proven public uh number of examples of of consumer reports making controversial decisions when it comes to Apple products whether or not you disagree with them uh it's not up for debate that they have upset apple and upset Apple Fans many times over the years through what people viewed as unfair assessment of their products um but having said all of that uh I welcome the opportunity to talk to consumer reports more they've certainly never given us comment in the past but they felt compelled to write an a press release about us so you know um I would like to go to their Labs can we go to their Labs I would love to I I would love to work with uh Consumer Reports I'd love to find out what they do because again I don't care about their assessment of the homepod that doesn't it doesn't matter to me if they don't like the homepod uh the problem is to a lot of people it looks like they have an agenda it looks like you know maybe uh maybe complaining about Apple products puts more eyeballs on on their stuff I don't know I don't I don't know what it is but uh you know where there's smoke there's fire there have been a few instances of these kind of things going on and it's not new and it's happened a few times and uh I'm not trying to question The credibility of them there or anything like that but it was odd that they published the same day uh that the speaker came out with a definitive conclusion which is not the consumer reports style usually they take a while to do it I don't know why they did it that way and we asked them why and they didn't really give us a clear answer so um despite the hu and cry and and the press release being issued and everything else we don't really have a clear explanation as to why they even told us they're working on a formal review that's forthcoming but in their you know first hot take on it the day of uh They said that the gum home Max sounds better and the Sonos one sounds better even though basically no reviews came to that conclusion they're the only ones that hold that conclusion so uh a little bit of controversy this week uh it was interesting um and I think uh hopefully cooler heads prevail in the end I'm not looking to pick a fight with Consumer Reports believe me um but you know I I just think that I think that uh uh I think that they deserve to be called out and questioned for the way that they handled that one now you said earlier that you have unique ways of using your homepod that you listen to music in unique ways I've been experimenting with it seeing what I can do with it so so how are you getting vinyl to homepod so to take a step back people keep complaining about homepod and how limited it is and how limited the access who it is and if you don't have an iPhone you can't use it well that's not entirely true or apple music if you don't have apple music you can't use homod again I don't have apple music not just I'm just repeating the words I know yeah um what people who are saying that don't realize and as somebody who has used AirPlay for a long time back when it was known as air Tunes um AirPlay has been around for a long time and it's been reverse engineer and hacked to death to the point now where there's a whole ecosystem of uh products and and applications and devices that tap into AirPlay in very interesting ways um and it's a very robust ecosystem if you know where to look to really get a great whole home speaker experience and even cheaper than you could with competing services like Sonos um so I'm a big airplane Enthusiast and I have a whole homeful of AirPlay stuff and I've done stuff like this in the past just kind of as a proof of concept because like you and like of our readers I'm guessing I'm just a nerdy guy who likes to go oh I wonder if I could do this I you know it's I wonder if I could do this and then you try it and lo and behold it works and you get a sense of accomplishment out of that so anyhow I have a uh cheap little record player that was given to me as a gift uh it's a Sylvania record player um it costs like $40 on Amazon it's not particularly great sounding or high quality record player but it offers a lot of unique features it has a built-in speaker so um you could just uh bring it with you and have batteries in it and just play music if you really want to bring your records with you out on the go or something um it has auxiliary out so you can plug it into other devices or speakers or whatever but it also has USB out and it also connects to a Mac with drivers and you can use it as audio line in so if you connect the USB port on the Sylvania player to your Mac you can then do whatever you want with that audio so one of the uses that would be obvious would be to have something that was only released on vinyl and you don't have a digital copy of it you want to convert it you could then play the record record it and have a digital copy of it one of the things you can do if you get a little clever is use an app like air foil which we mentioned before which is a third party app from a great developer called rogba yeah that's Paul cass's U company they've been around for a long time and they make a lot of great products but some of the great things that they do are AirPlay related so they I met I met them back at macor in the old days actually oh nice I they were I was tweeting with them uh uh a few days ago they were Thanking us for writing articles about them and they do great stuff this is not they're not paying me or anything like that I just really think they do a great job we again about audio hijack and their loop back applications but like Paul is a great guy yeah and uh they have a whole Suite of AirPlay application so you can turn um any device that you have into an AirPlay receiver you can turn your iPhone into an AirPlay receiver so start music on one device or take an old iPod touch or an old iPhone and have it plugged into something and it would receive music and you could use it as an AirPlay receiver and plug speakers into it or whatever you can do all kinds of crazy stuff cool stuff like that it works on Windows it works on Mac and you can get the the main air foil and Linux and you can get the main air foil app for your Mac and then you can use any device and if you wanted you know a midi controller for an instrument or whatever and then use that line in capability with air foil to beam any audio to your homepod so just as a proof of concept uh I did it now you I mean obviously there's some limitations there's some lag there's this there's that um but it's cool um I connected my record player to my Mac and then I used air foil to beam it to my homepod and there I was listening to a record player on my homepod so for all the naysayers out there who say that the homep Pod is limited and you can't connect to things and you can't do things with it I say that's hogwash I say if you want to get a little clever with it and it doesn't really take much time or effort or money um you can do some really cool things and listen to basically whatever music you would want on your homepod uh there are AirPlay hacks on Android and if you wanted to use an Android device to stream music to it you could uh homepod works very well with AirPlay and AirPlay has been hacked to bits and uh un unpacked and and repurposed in all kinds of cool ways and it's a lot more connected than you realize awesome well next up we have a very special thing we have an interview with the number one Comedy album on iTunes we have the comedian himself coming on the show and that's going to be very special so I'd like to welcome a very special guest to this segment of the Apple Insider podcast joining us now is Will Ables and will is the the holder of the title for having a number one comedy album on iTunes yep and hi welcome that's that's got to be really cool seeing yourself in iTunes and seeing yourself alongside other people that that you know you you might never think to be in the company of oh yeah that was definitely the uh the coolest part I mean the original goal was like all right let's see if we can break the top 10 um because just the names that were surrounding me were so they're you know your idols and people that you one day hope to become I mean it was uh like Adam Sandler was on there John malany Jim Gaffigan so I was like looking at those names and I was like all right well maybe maybe the top 10 and then when it debuted number one uh I just couldn't believe it it was it was just surreal but let's let's back up a little bit because you know you said maybe the goal is to to break the top 10 but before that how did you get from performing to the goal of making an album yeah uh so the way it all kind of came together was uh I run a show in New York uh it's a monthly standup show called hey guys and we were celebrating the one-year anniversary of it and so we put together this kind of Allstar showcase and then I was going to do a new half hour at the end of it and a friend of mine who's a musician and a producer just on a whim was like oh I'd like to record it you know I want to practice recording and so I said all right I could you know if it comes out well enough maybe we can release it as like a half hour album and the show went well uh the recording was great but I just didn't quite have the set that I wanted so we booked the whole thing again we uh focused only on the album this time so that was nice so we separated ourselves from the show from hey guys and it was just the will Ables album recording and I booked a couple different Comics keeping in mind that I needed the energy to be high and I also didn't need them to steal the show so I I had to specify uh who who we booked based on that and we brought all the equipment back and I ended up you know recording 40 minutes uh got a great crowd in and yeah and then that was kind of the last easy thing to happen with the rest of the album release I I'm I'm sort of hesitant I kind of think I know where you're going with that but um you know longtime listeners of of this program know that from time to time we've had issues with recording equipment and audio production quality and and things that we've had to learn how to overcome so I'm I'm sort of I I got a I'm hesitant and at the same time I have to ask what happened next yeah so then now we're coming off of the the recording and just for um just so I could hear it before uh my producer before my co-producer sent me the uh the first recording I just happen to record it on my phone because I pretty much tape every set on my phone on my iPhone and I listened to it I was like oh this is great this sounds great I can't wait to hear what it sounds like with actual professional equipment and uh two days later I got a an email from from him and he was like Hey you're not going to believe this uh I wasn't uh so he he had a lot I don't want to throw him under the bus because it's not entirely his fault he had a lot of hats on yeah the thing to REM remember is that something always goes wrong and it's not exactly necessarily anyone's fault like there's nothing intentional but equipment fails or there's a human error or or whatever but there's there's a frequently a problem right yeah and so what happened is he he emails me and says hey so we lost all the audio um I was he was also filming it and he was like while I was filming I didn't notice that the audio that uh was connected to your microphone specifically turned off about halfway through the opener so we lost all of the audio for an album recording and you know I think in any other scenario or any other comic on the planet would have said well we have to record this again but I'm a fairly unknown comedian especially in the New York scene so I didn't think we could fill the room again for a third time that was kind of our big our big hurdle and I was like well let's just see what we can do with the audio from the cameras because we had two or three cameras running and so we took the audio off of that and that's the majority of the album and then because I happen to record it on my phone that was what we ended up using as the uh the constant through through the through the whole editing process so yeah we ended up using my iPhone recording and Camera recording the audio from the cameras and and you you sent me some notes from your co-producer and and they say you know we used a otu a mark of the Unicorn 8 pre- audio interface which is a fantastic interface two AK G c214 mics to capture the room sound and the board mix that had the microphone mhm running it all into Protools 12 you know you're you're using really top quality gear right the the the the equipment is not the problem you've got fantastic equipment you've got fantastic mics you've got a fantastic interface you've got all the things that you should have in place yeah and and the first time we recorded it with that exact same equipment the audio was fantastic it sounded incredible I I I was I mean listening to it with him I was like this this is so professional I mean I I feel like beyond my years in comedy just listening to this so it was so much more disappointing the second time around when he was like yeah I guess my computer turned off or I actually don't know what caused it to just turn off like that but yeah so that's that's ended up that's that's what ended up happening so there you have it you Ed the iPhone audio for your iTunes Al yeah yeah it actually sounded uh better than I expected better than I expected for sure and you know the iPhone itself is a fine recorder the the thing that it needs to have is a good mic and a good mic interface in front of it to really make it work well and uh you know I think I'm we can talk more about that offline but I want to give you some tips and see things that you could do just to have that always in your back pocket yeah no that'd be great um so the cameras you're using were the Canon 5D yeah you're pulling audio off of those wow yeah and the one thing with the with the 5D is that it and I'm sure you can adjust the settings but um we weren't really working with professional uh cameramen so we uh it turns off every 12 minutes it stops recording every 12 minutes or so so that was actually why we were lucky to have recorded it on my iPhone because the iPhone was a straight through 40 minute recording whereas the cameras it cuts off about every 12 minutes so we needed the iPhone to fill in that that kind of second that we were missing between each one so you used the camera audio and then filled in with the iPhone audio yeah yeah that sounds like a complex edit yeah I mean it he put it together in just in one sitting um because we kind of we also took it and just had to kind of say all right well we'll brand it as a live album because was at that point there's no way we can use the other recording from the first run because the audio was so vastly different um and you know he just he kind of raised the levels and he couldn't really get rid of uh too much of the like the the the room noises uh that was a whole another thing was that room was so much noisier than I had anticipated Just Between the buzzing of the lights the bar upstairs their Keg Room was downstairs so you can hear the co CO2 two popping uh at one point the show after us came in while I was finishing up and there they had a bag of balloons and the balloons hit one of the cameras so you have the sound of a balloon hitting a camera and those are the kind of things that he couldn't quite eliminate um so that was uh that was probably the next hurdle was okay it's a live album but it also sounds kind of crazy yeah and he did a lot of the cleanup for that in uh isotope rx6 yeah yeah using the fre weeks trial of it mhm and we we have a license for rx6 and use it here a lot it's really helpful for taking out Reverb and editing out single noises that occur and things like that you know I I take out sirens and stuff like that from time to time on Neil's audio Yeah and uh I think it's really impressive that you're able to use the the onewe trial of that to uh clean this up a lot yeah and I think that was one of the things I don't think um my first editor being my co-producer I don't know if he entirely knew how to use it because he was just using the trial so it was one of his first times using it uh and I think if he had a little more experience with it we could have definitely utilized it better but for what he did do with it it already sounded you know 100% better than what it did when we first started yeah the way that they do that product is they give a bunch of plugins that learn the audio process the audio and you you can use the defaults reasonably well and get pretty far just by clicking through you know three default presets and have it deliver the audio and that's okay that goes a long way and and honestly 90% of the time that's what I'm doing too uh but they make a uh a website for it called the RX cookbook and you can search the RX cookbook for specific examples of problems like the siren or a cat meow or a door Clos or or you know these kinds of noises and they tell you what to do to the presets to take care of those things and quickly teach you the product for the specific problem you're trying to solve for yeah I mean and that's that's great yeah it's a very cool thing so so you you lost all the audio you pieced it back together out of out of recording using the iPhones mic which is really quite incredible what are some of the things that you learn from this what what are some of the things that you do next time differently uh well I would definitely plan on recording it more than two times uh that was the biggest thing I took out of it uh was just because that's one of the challenges of um running longer comedy sets in New York is uh it's there's not a lot of opportunities to run more than 10 minutes so when I ran the half hour the first time that was pretty much the first time I'd run that half hour uh at least a new half hour so you know I wasn't really thinking ahead too much cuz again we weren't really planning on making this into an album so that was kind of the the problem but you know I would definitely have prepared myself uh a little bit more to have a couple of runs set up and recorded it maybe three or four times that's definitely something I would have done the comics I booked I would that's something I wouldn't change I definitely book them again and I think another thing would be just I felt a lot of pressure and it was all self-driven but I felt a lot of pressure to get the album out as quickly as possible possible and knowing what I what I know now I would definitely have just been a little more patient because the next step was going through the the publisher and I chose to use CD Baby and they're very hands-off uh and so that was a good learning experience for me but I definitely missed a few things you know cuz I felt like I was rushing through it and I was self-producing this album now through them for the first time ever so I probably if I could go back I definitely would have been a lot more patient and maybe ask a little more advice on how to go through the publishing process besides the the overcoming the recording fault and things like that what are the other reasons that you would book two shows for book three dates for why why would you record more than a couple of time more than once if you knew that you had the equipment all locked down um just you know some jokes just hit differently with different audiences and so by recording two or three times uh you have a chance to instead of having okay I know five out of these 12 jokes are this is the a material these are always going to hit these are always going to be big laughs you have a chance to get an audience in there that for a lack of a better word call it the B material the B material hits like a material and so then if you have two or three runs of it and you're lucky enough that every joke hit at least one time through that whole recording uh then you can start piecing it together and it sounds like every single joke was the biggest laugh you'd ever heard and that being said we had a great audience on both of them and spe specifically the second show every joke hit really well but I was also performing mostly in front of friends so that was another thing was it'd be nice to get a fresh audience in who maybe hadn't heard me before uh because some of the jokes I know specifically my roommate and my girlfriend were in the audience and they know these jokes better than anybody you know so it's um tough to to force a laugh when know the punch line I guess but that was one reason I would definitely uh try and record again just to try and piece together that that perfect every joke hit set so how how hard is it to get people to come to these kinds of things uh well New York specifically it's difficult because there are 8 million shows I mean there's you could go see seven shows a night if you wanted to and you probably would have missed some I mean that's that's what makes it really hard to fill seats because it's difficult to make uh the show stand out and you can book Comics that have been on Comedy Central that have you know maybe not necessarily been on Netflix because those guys are probably selling out Arenas and giant theaters on their own but you can have TV credited comics and because you're in New York no one no one cares everyone kind of takes it for granted they're like yeah I I just saw a TV credited comic at dinner tonight you know he's my friend that that kind of thing so no one's really impressed so that makes it really difficult and just yeah just the promotion aspect of it it's hard to rise above you know sure someone could go see my album recording but they could also go see Hamilton and that's that's really what makes it difficult to get butts and seats is most shows don't stand out when you're looking at the broad spectrum of what do I want to do tonight right it's hard to get your show uh recognized now you said one of the things that you wouldn't change were the people that you'd booked to to open for you yeah they uh they were fantastic so I booked uh she she's starting to she's starting to blow up a little bit her name's Caitlyn PFO I I booked her to host because she's super high energy uh very very funny and she's very kind she has a great uh point of view and just she has this this energy that just really can't be matched I mean I've never seen someone perform the way she does and she knows how to work a room so she can gauge the audience she can figure out okay where do where where where is this going wrong like what's going right and she can read them and she can see what they like and she'll Hammer at home and then the second comic was a guy named Joe Pera and Joe's a pretty big comic and he's got a really uh devout following and very unique guy he's got a lot of stuff on Adult Swim and I booked Joe because Joe is one of the funniest Comics I've ever seen but he has a very low energy uh so between him and and Caitlyn there was this kind of wave of energy and and laughter that I sort of preemptively calculated thinking okay Caitlyn's gonna come in she's gonna be big she's goingon to be loud she's going to be very funny and they're going to laugh really hard and then you have Joe who's going to keep riding that wave they're going to keep enjoying themselves a lot of my friends were there just to see Joe because he he's just that funny which is funny that you know that was that was another thing is when I booked it a second time I had to give my friends that went the first time an incentive to come so I booked Joe perah because just a lot of people love him and so I knew that yeah he would go second he would not be super high energy he wouldn't suck the energy out of the room but he would keep the laughs going he would keep them in it and people would really enjoy it and then Caitlyn had another minute or two to get the energy back up if she needed to and then I can kind of ride the momentum of the wave going back up and then I just go into my set and it worked perfectly I mean that actually worked which was nice to see that that wasn't some crazy Theory I had uh and they were just they were fantastic um you know and Joe had to Joe had to also kill a little time on his own and ended up singing Hang on Sloopy which was just if if you're a fan of Joe Pera just seeing him off the cuff start singing Hang on Sloopy was just the best part of the night so so why did that happen so again my producer is a music based and in comedy you know the way we kind of check each other make sure you know where you're at during the set so if you have a 10-minute set somebody gives you the light as we say at 9 Minutes usually and usually what that is it's just someone turns their cell phone on and they wave their cell phone at you so you know that you have one minute left and like in the old days waving a flashlight at you or something so that You' know that's your time yeah but yeah basically the the flashlight has been replaced with a a cell foam and again because was wearing so many hats between filming and recording and he was also teching the show when he held his phone up uh the light wasn't on and I obviously wasn't paying attention because I'm about to do 40 minutes of standup so my my my brain was elsewhere yeah you're preparing yeah and I did think at one point man Joe's um Joe's been up there for a while and finally Joe himself was like hey um how much time like how much more time do you want me to do and that's when Caitlyn was like I don't think the lights on I looked up and I see see my producer just shaking his phone and that's like oh so Joe has been up there for about 15 minutes but you know you wouldn't have known it until he asked and I'm glad he did and and that's what happened so the positive part was we got him to sing Hang on Sloopy out of it and everyone kind of got back into it and yeah that that was how it all went yeah nothing is easy in performing right there's always going to be something that happens no I mean we could have had a hundred people working on this and I'm I'm sure something else would have found its way in absolutely yeah from from there you you said you took it to CD Baby so what what happened going through CD baby cu you said that that was kind of hands off and you had to sort of um you know stumble through that yeah so um well actually one one thing I actually I forgot I kind of skipped over this um before I went to CD Baby we actually did have a second editor come in uh and that was when cuz we were talking about the RX isotope and he actually was a professional audio engineer so he also used that and then we ended up being able to clean up some of the things uh in the recording itself so I accidentally skipped over that yeah so I was about to go into CD Baby I was all excited we just gotten the copy back and then my girlfriend got home from work and she was like I was just talking to my friend and I don't know why you don't ask her boyfriend to do it who I knew and so he actually did get a hold of it and he spent 3 weeks on it cleaning it up um even more than it already was so he actually was the one that was able to get out the like air conditioning the room noise the you know the beer cans opening and all that and then when he got it back to me that was when we went into into CD Baby and so during the time he was uh editing I went through I asked a couple of other Comics that had released albums uh to see who they went through in terms of publishing and it kind of came down to tune core and and CD Baby and they're both great publishing uh websites but what it came down to was money and uh ton Corp takes a little more out of it and they have a yearly charge that they make and in my head I was like well I'm not going to make that much money off this so if I'm going to be charged yearly I'm going to end up losing a lot of money uh so I went through CD baby but that was the difference was there a lot more hands off um and so it comedy is interesting because it becomes a bit confusing cuz you're like well is this just comedy like is there a comedy section that I can edit this in or is or I can publish this through and it's you know a spoken word so then you start getting mixed in with the spoken word Group which could be yoga it could be poems you know so that was that was also hard to navigate and branding it live also took it to another level I mean it it was it was a lot of stuff that really I just really didn't understand while I was going through it as you can kind of tell by the way I'm wording this so how how about the promotion of it you've gotten it published you've gotten CD Baby figured out how do you promote it because it's it's one thing to go ahead and publish something but if if no one buys it you've just got a nice vanity project right right well and that was the part that I uh I'm probably the most proud of out of all of it was was the actual promotion because that was another another part where we or where I I made a plan and stuck to that plan and it actually worked out and so one thing I I started thinking about was okay how like how does this make a dent uh how does this you know get any recognition and I started thinking about who would want to listen to this and who would on top of that buy it and what I really kind of you know had this eye openening moment was well you know it was produced by myself and by friends the audience was the majority of them were my friends you know uh the people that were Ed it they were all my friends and I was like oh my friends my friends and family they're my fans at this point uh and so I went back to Maryland and I decided to consolidate so the first thing I did was I was like all right I'm I'm only going to promote it through iTunes um because just personally I felt that uh making a dent on iTunes meant more than than Amazon because iTunes is music you know it is it is comedy it is all these things you buy albums you listen to albums through iTunes whereas Amazon is everything on the entire planet and so I wanted to focus everything to be on iTunes and also just breaking into their top 10 was just would be a really cool thing to do and so I first Consolidated to that and then I went back to Maryland and I decided to really push home put sorry to really uh hammer at home and lucky I'm lucky enough that one of my friends from high school is now a news anchor on the local four state Channel and I got a hold of him and he sent me one of their their journalists and we put together this really really cool promotional piece for the uh for the album And She interviewed me and we did that all back home in my hometown and it was great I mean it got the word out to people that I that probably wouldn't have heard about it otherwise you know because unless you're my friend on Facebook or you follow like some very small blogs that were willing to help me out it's pretty hard to get it out there you know it's hard to it's hard to promote this outside of your bubble so I just decided to stay in my bubble and and hope that there were a couple people that just that hadn't really thought of me or I hadn't thought of them that were like oh okay yeah I'll check this out and it worked I mean and it ended up working it was it was cool I would get messages from people that I hadn't seen or even people from my hometown that I never even met that just were like hey this is so cool to see a HomeTown guy doing and that was kind of the goal was to reach out to them so it was great that we had this plan or I had this plan it actually came through and yeah and then the day of when it actually was released at number one that was that was the biggest shocker was just oh my God I made a plan and the plan worked you know after all the things we had to kind of stumble through with the audio and trying to figure out CD baby and all these things the one thing that really worked was the thing that mattered the most and that was the the promotion yeah yeah it was great describe for me the moment when you found out that it was number one oh this was a such a such such a moment to remember so the original date we wanted to release it was in November and like I said that was when we we I handed it off to a second editor and he had it then so I was like well I'm not going to rush through this and and so then I decided Well the album's called regrets of my father so the probably biggest regret my father's ever had was the day I was born wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute okay can I I know it's on the album can you give us a little bit of a teaser about that story you don't have to do the whole bit but just give us something to help us understand what that means oh well I mean you know it's purely uh purely a joke but uh you know if you look at my four siblings and I I'm the oldest of four and and you know my my brother who's right below me in terms of age he's a a scientist and my sister's going to be a teacher and well just looking back my priorities were never uh I guess what what my dad would have preferred I mean my dad was a big baseball guy he's a finance guy and I spent a lot of my time uh focusing on let's say the Arts I guess and uh I I guess the the biggest moment I think my dad had when he was like there's something up with this kid is I uh well I rewrote my own version of the hit play hit Broadway play cats and I think that was moment my dad was like all right so he'll probably play baseball for a couple years but um I think his uh his priorities are going to be elsewhere yeah and so that was kind of the and I just I just thought that out when we first when I first first made up this uh album title I just thought it was too funny um because my dad's always been very supportive and that is something that that comes around on the album as I talk about him trying to figure out how to raise me as a kid versus you know how supportive he actually was at the very end of it all uh but it just it just thought it was such a good album title for uh for a comic specifically you know and I think a lot of the lot of the guys and girls that do this can relate to it um but yeah and so then I decided to release the album on my uh on my birthday and there was a little there was a little bit of it too it was like well is either going to be a day a birthday to remember or a birthday that I'm very much going to want to forget and so it's the 20th it's December 20th and that was when all of a sudden you know I was very confident about everything I was confident that it sounded good I was confident about the promotions and I thought yeah we're going to break the top 10 and in the back of my mind I really wanted to be number one I was like I want to be the number one comedy album that's the goal but you know you don't you I was like my second goal is top 10 but I really want to be number one and then all of a sudden the day of you know it's going to be released at midnight and I just got that feeling in your stomach and I was like looking at the other guys in the top 10 and like I said it's guys like Jim Gaffigan and John Main and Adam Sandler and I was like how am I going to beat these guys you know and that just kind of kept growing and then I had a show that night as well and the show wasn't very good and I was like uh this is this is kind of weird I don't know I don't know and I was and there's a a comedy show around the corner from my from my apartment and I was going to go there so I could celebrate with other Comics at midnight and then all of a sudden I thought no because if this doesn't even break the top 10 what am I going to do I'm just going to be stuck there with everybody and so one of my friends came over my uh my girlfriend was here and my roommate was here and we're all sitting around waiting toward till midnight and my girlfriend has really long hours so she had to go to bed and my roommate he has long hour so he ended up going to bed and my friend had gotten off work and they had a long day so they had fallen asleep on the couch so so yeah so I'm sitting here you know we're watching a couple of Netflix specials or we is I at this point so I'm watching Rory scov cuz it was my favorite special of last year and it's like 11:58 I'm mentally preparing myself to not be in the top 10 but then to try and still enjoy my birthday and midnight hits I go to iTunes and I see my album cover is the Insignia 4 comedy albums on iTunes and I was like is that just because this is my iTunes or is that a good thing and so I click on it and I see the charts and I see that I'm number one and I just yell out oh my God I'm number one my my friend on the couch wakes up for a second and just was like oh happy birthday and I was like no you don't understand man wake up I was like the album's number one yeah so I run into my bedroom and I wake up my girlfriend and I was like hey the album's number one and she like yeah can I go back to sleep she's like oh happy birthday yeah so she wishes me a happy birthday I was like no I care about my birthday yeah and so she fall was asleep finally I calm myself down and I realized everyone in my apartment's asleep and I want to celebrate so I went into my Atrium I went out into the hallway which connects to all the other apartments in the building and I put my headphones on I brought my computer out and I ended up just you know tweet tweeting about it and Instagram putting stuff on Instagram and putting stuff on Facebook and just having a beer to myself sitting next to a pile of shoes and so you know you have this idea that you're going to be celebrating there's going to be champagne everywhere you know there's going to be great music playing and you're just going to be raging and instead you're sitting outside next to a pile of shoes drinking a beer watching Netflix on your computer but uh definitely will never forget it and it was just this feeling where I just I didn't know how I was going to sleep I was so excited and I couldn't wait to wake up the next day and then properly celebrate it with everybody when they were awake but yeah it was really it was really cool and it uh you know it stayed at number one for the full day uh I kept checking cuz I was like a there's no way it's going to stay there and it stayed there for 24 hours the next day it uh went between 2 and three which is also very cool just to stay there and then stayed in the top 10 for a couple of days and then and then it uh very quickly moved moved out of the top 10 and out of the charts entirely but uh it did a lot better I mean just staying in the top 10 for a couple days was also uh exciting because I didn't know how long it would stay in there and then to go from number one and then stay in there that was yeah it was all just unreal yeah I can kind of Imagine going and refreshing and just you know I gotta go check right yeah I'll be right back I gotta go check iTunes yeah and then uh you know being on my phone all day checking it on on my phone all day uh taking about 10,000 screenshots to make sure it was actually happening you know and sending it to people I me like this is this is real right this is number one right can you just do me a favor and go to iTunes and check for me yeah yeah yeah just make sure it's not mine I want to make sure it's not my computer it's actually on everyone else's although if we could do that that would be a really fun practical joke oh that be horrible be terrible uh yeah would would be funny really demoralizing wouldn't it yeah it' be funny years later like years later I'd be like a that's a pretty good prank but uh it would probably take couple couple of sessions in therapy and uh yeah a couple years to distance myself before I'd really find a humor in it good way to make enemies though yeah it's a great way probably the best way this has been a lot of fun for me I've really enjoyed having you talk to me about this um I I really think that uh promotion is probably one of the most difficult Parts you know the the production and things well I say that and I'm wrong but um writing the material and and having good material is probably one of the most difficult parts and promotion is probably the second most difficult part of it yeah cuz the funny thing about production is is you know sure we had a we'll call it a hiccup if you want to call losing the audio for an album a hiccup but you know the thing is you you'll find people that know how to use the equipment you know and kind of like I said if I did it again we could have recorded it um but yeah promotion was definitely difficult uh and there was a lot of guys around the comedy scene that were asking me how we got it out there and that was some of my advice I was like you know guys take it take it to where the audience is take it to where your fans are and that yeah and I I with you number number one is definitely writing the material because there's a lot of stuff when you're going through it where you're like well this is very funny to me and the longer I do this I I do find that if it's funny to me then it'll be funny to and I put this in quote my audience um but yeah it's it's it you know at first especially right now it's uh it's a little it's a little difficult because yeah not everything not everyone is your audience right now so that whole mentality of well this is funny to me let me put this up there so you do have to find kind of I don't want to say generic but you do have to kind of find the middle of the road material that you're like all right if I'm doing a show in the middle of Pennsylvania uh this joke will work and if I'm doing a this joke in a bar show in Brooklyn this joke will work you know a lot of that stuff more broadly applicable kind of stuff broadly accessible yeah exactly yeah but I enjoy it I mean the writing process is probably my favorite part cuz there's nothing better than when you get a new bit and you go and try it out and it actually works there's nothing worse when you have a new bit and you go and try it out and it's awful but there's nothing nothing better than when you just you have this idea and you're like oh man this is a good one I'm really going to tell this one about uh oh God I don't know I I'm that's the other thing is now the album's out I'm in back in the writing process trying to create new jokes and like the other day I wrote something about you know what uh what your salad dressing what kind of salad dressing you you use and what it means about you and it was just it was just the worst but yeah there's nothing better not the first time I've heard things about salad dressing like that you know what what Russian dressing says about you or what French dressing says about you versus vinegret kind of thing yeah I mean that's kind of what the whole thing was and you know it was a good writing exercise I guess if anything but I don't know it's funny it's it's it's funny to be writing again now the album's out because again it it did well but it's not like I'm going to walk into a lot of these shows of people are going to be like oh no he's telling the jokes from the album you know I'm not yeah it's not like uh it's not like it's not like when you see some of the huge comics and you're like oh man he's doing that from the Netflix special no one's saying that to me about the album so I can still tell all of those jokes I can still work on them I can even make them better than what some people actually heard them if they did listen to the album but you know it's there is this kind of thing in the back of my mind where I'm like I'm a fraud I need to do new material I got to tell new jokes tonight so I mean that that material still has legs like you say but um yeah I I think it's important to not let that material Define you that you you want to instead of trying to write something that's like that because that was successful you you have to be bold enough to write something new and different from that otherwise you sort of get trapped by trying to repeat what you did that was original before yeah I agree that is definitely something I'm going through right now um because I I do a lot of Storytelling and a lot of my jokes hinge on one another to make sense which so when I'm doing a lot of short sets when I'm doing seven to 10 minute sets it's tough to get all that in there but when I do these longer sets it works because you know I have a joke about my dad that hinges on a joke about my brother that hinges on a joke about my girlfriend and uh I living together that hinges on a joke I have about Michael Phelps you know I mean it's it's this weird through line through most of it so that's now that I'm writing again it's um it's tough to go well that's a joke about somebody being drunk and I already had a joke about somebody being drunk so I'm going to basically be doing the same impression in the same voice and the same mannerisms and yeah so I'm trying to start thinking outside of of that material because that album specifically I think was about growing up uh right now in New York being in my 20s and what that means versus when my dad was in his 20s and that whole kind of d dnamic of what what is success now what is being an adult you know do you have to do all these things do you have to check off all the check all the boxes to make sure that you're the adult now you know or can I wait till I'm 35 to be technically an adult you know that kind of thing so yeah now I'm trying to write material beyond that what's what's next and it it's definitely tough because you just want to kind of sit back and you want to do the same stuff you were already doing and tell the same goofy jokes but you do need to grow and you know it makes me respect music a lot when these guys come out with albums and they're wildly different from the last one those are the the difficult ones right it's it's so easy to get trapped into trying to emulate what you did before that was successful right and and I also understand the difference between comedy and music big thing with comedy is there's a certain brand that you're attracted to a a comic because you relate to them or you like that brand and so I don't want to go too far outside of of the Willa's brand so to speak because then someone's like wait a minute why is he doing that and you know there it's it's tough cuz you're you're you're on that balance of well I want to do something new and different and edgy but I also don't want someone to come in and go oh man he really fell off or you know I liked when he told stories and now he's doing onliners and he's really bad at that I like when he told stories and now he's doing physical comedy with watermelons yeah yeah exactly or it's yeah know it's like I okay well we'll just say it's a onean show instead of Comedy now maybe that'll make up for it not being funny anymore you know that kind of thing no let's not do that let's keep it being funny yeah I'll do my best I think for for everyone's sake I'll do my best on that one you know what would you like people to do most do you want people to go to your website do you want to go to iTunes and and have them buy the album how would you like to tell people to to to follow up on this um well where I'm at now I mean if anyone wants to buy the album I'm I'd be ecstatic for you to keep buying the album but once uh once the pre-sales end and the actual you know the it's it's out for wide release I really think that streaming is where it uh starts you start moving into focusing on the streaming specifically because gets the numbers up there and when you get on the sites like uh you know like Spotify and apple music it starts floating around you get attached the playlists and it just it it broadens uh the the amount of people that it can actually reach so you know I wouldn't check it on my website because my website is embarrassingly bad uh that is a that's a year goal is to update the website it's just you know there's good WordPress sites and then there's my website and and I honestly I don't even know if they could find it if they went to my website because it's so hard to navigate I just did not set it up well at all so yeah uh honestly if you just type my name in there's I'm the only will Ables doing comedy uh I did notice that when you type will Ables into iTunes though you find my name in my album and then you find a lot of uh gospel music and Christian rock music because I think every album in the gospel or uh Christian rock genre says willing and able at some point so if you put gospel into your show yeah then you'll pick up all those people too the whole thing unlock yeah yeah I got the Willing Ena crowd but yeah I would just stream it I mean check it out you know if if you like it you can buy it but uh you know it really helps to get those numbers up and get it get some exposure with it and get it moving around fantastic well I I really appreciate you giving us time to talk about this I I want to thank you for going into details on the audio production side especially with the hiccup it's um it's not always easy to talk about uh where there have been problems and I I appreciate you're being open about that of course yeah I mean I also like to talk about it because there sometimes you do listen to it and you're like oh I really thought it would have sounded this way but then when you hear the backstory you're like oh wow I can't believe it sounded like that so so you know I'm I'm always open to talk about it uh it's kind of like yeah but you should have heard it before yeah if you heard the first night that's actually what I said to a couple people um and I do have a few friends that listened to it when it was just on my iPhone and they even said they're like oh yeah it it's it's pretty impressive what what both your editors did and what you guys turned out but when you only hear the one time you're like okay but you know I still think it sounds great I think you've got a lot to be proud of I mean you made it to number one on iTunes with all of these troubles in place and I I yeah am looking forward to what you do next oh thank you I'll make sure uh make sure you know about it fantastic thank you so much will Ables everybody and uh we will be back next week with another episode of the Apple Insider podcast well this has been the Apple Insider podcast episode 160 I'm your host VI and joining me has been Neil internet famous nerdy guy Hughes very famous let me tell you the and humble and nerdy don't forget if you want to reach us if you want to reach us please write to newsapple insider.com please tweet at us yeah I'm at V marks Neil you're I am uh so famous that I have a verified Twitter account and I am at this is Neil well there you go we we are all in awe of that you have one too I'm still in awe of that well there you go aren't you special that means when you tweet at a celebrity they get a notification they know that you're harassing them yes we will be happy to hear from you happy to respond to you and we're also happy when you leave us positive reviews on iTunes so thank you so much for that thank you for listening we will be back with more next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 160 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I need to catch my breath wow no I am doing great how are you I'm doing all right can't complain we talk a lot about these different kinds of things and we we get into the minutia of what Apple's doing and what their profits look like and and all these things and sometimes I like to take a step back and just hear from our listeners and hear about what their experiences are and what are the things they're confronting as they use this stuff and that's the sort of thing that we would do 10 years ago or 15 years ago as Apple users because we were a much smaller group of people right and and so we would be much more focused on forming a sense of community and helping each other out but it still happens from time to time and I'm always heartened to see it so if if there's a listener out there that wants to send us email or tweet it us and tell us about the kinds of things that you're seeing and confronting or or working through as you make your buying decisions you know do you get the iPhone 10 do you get the iPhone 8 plus do you go for a homepod what are the things that you're thinking about we'd love to talk with you about those things and we'd love to be able to talk about them on the podcast now along those lines I've got a letter from a listener a little bit later on but um let's get through the news so we ran a story that says that that apple is an incredible money-making machine you published this this morning this very morning that the Apple iPhone has captured 51% of global smartphone Revenue yeah um this is the latest uh data from strategy analytics so you can never really know 100% for sure because uh there's a lot of numbers being fudged around and uh different companies report different things so they do their best sort of estimates but their latest data shows that for the first time ever uh Apple captured more than 50% of Revenue so you're looking at them holding the Lion Share of the global smartphone industry well ahead of Samsung um and it's really mostly just a two horse race at this point but uh the market is bigger than ever and apple is a bigger share than ever of that market uh they are doing extremely well and really driving the average selling price of smartphones higher with the launch of the iPhone 10 last November uh you saw Apple's average selling price spike to almost $800 um and that really is kind of a GameChanger for the industry and so you know there's a question of how much blood can you get out of the stone in terms of growth um I think Apple realized very smartly um not too long ago that uh and growth is not necessarily where they're going to find in terms of unit sales uh they can push more into the higher end of the market for people that want those kind of devices and we've talked about this many times on the podast podcast is why you see them diversifying uh their uh lineup and appealing to all kinds of broad markets um from low end to high end but consumers clearly in terms of buying iPhones gravitate toward the higher end of the market and so that's where you're seeing these higher average selling prices and that's where you're seeing that Apple's share of Revenue continues to grow and so strategy analytics put out this data this week uh declaring Apple quote an incredible money-making machine um and it's pretty hard to dispute that yeah it's interesting you know as you mentioned there are two different ways to think about growth there's there's this growth in terms of Revenue or there's growth in terms of units in people's hands right you could be Samsung and have many more phones out there in people's hands but those phones have a lower average selling price and so Samsung makes less by Revenue right and and so Apple here is raising their price and placing value on on taking even more of that money and having that customer that's willing to spend more which is not a bad customer to have interesting I I was thinking about this as you were speaking that historically years ago before we had iPhones when it was just the Mac that people always complained that the Mac was too expensive and and Mac fans talked about how uh market share didn't matter because you know yes the Mac was a very low part of market share but that they had a quality machine that they had quality service from from a quality company and that all of those things mattered more than whether or not the Mac LED PC or not and here I'm seeing that kind of flipped around where the the instead of chasing the lower cost machine like the Mac Mini or bringing down the price of the Power Mac or bringing down the price of a PowerBook kind of thing which were things that Apple did over time to make them more accessible to more people here the price is going up does that make it less accessible to to as I said you know they have a very broad product lineup and so consumers that are buying the iPhone are clearly gravitating toward the high end but you can go get a very capable A9 powered iPhone SE with you know 60 or 32 gigs of storage and a 12 megapixel camera for $350 unlocked at the store so uh consumers you know with the average selling price at $800 are are gravitating toward those higher end models but you know it's never been more affordable than right now to get into the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone and an iPad so um it's a little different there I think um you know the news just came out this week that the Mac uh at least the MacBook line um moved up for the first time ever to the number four largest notebook lineup in the world uh that's the highest that Apple's ever been ranked so I mean the Mac is doing well obviously but um it's still only 9% of Apple's Revenue if you look at the numbers um in in the stories that we ran uh this week you know the Financial Focus stuff um you're looking at uh in in the next year um they are projected that the homepod the combination of homod Apple watch and airpods will be making more money than the Mac so you see where kind of the writing is on the wall and this really upsets a lot of old school Apple Fans because Apple at the end of the day is a business and they need to make money and they need to give consumers what they want and the Mac is less and less a part of that picture now that doesn't mean it's going away the Mac is still 9% of their revenue it's a for any other company they would kill to have those kind of numbers you know um but you see why the focus is so much on the iPhone you're looking at 63% of their revenue coming from one product lineup and so that's why they continue to diversify and expand to all price ranges that they could possibly get into because there's never been a more expensive iPhone than there is right now but it's never been more affordable to get an iPhone than it is right now too and you know with the expectations the iPhone SE is going to get an update in the next few months um they're clearly going to continue that multi-pronged approach to the market and I wish that they would more with the Mac in that respect you know the Mac Mini was originally introduced as the most affordable way to get into the Apple lineup right under $500 you could get the first Mac mini um and what what have they done with that in the last you know six seven years nothing uh and it's a shame you know it would be really cool to see a Mac Mini the size of a little Apple TV uh you know with Thunderbolt 3 and uh you know the ability connect wireless keyboard mouse and get an Apple built Monitor and you know get your get your whole setup done for on the cheap have a really great desktop system that's pretty capable um you know support for egpu that sort of stuff you could do all kinds of really neat stuff yeah and you know the Mac Mini when it came out was such a breakthrough in terms of getting people on board the Mac that hadn't even considered as an option before uh the idea that all you had to do was bring your keyboard video and mouse was was kind of a big deal and it turned out that it enabled businesses that hadn't even existed before like Mac Mini Colo where you could go ahead and collocate a server on a Mac Mini it led them to introduce a Mac Mini as a server product even it was a kind of really cool thing that they hadn't even thought would happen yeah and and it it would be nice and I know that they keep saying that they're going to revisit it um but it would be nice to see them revisit in Earnest because I think that you could see that share of Revenue grow from the 9% where it's at now I mean certainly it's never going to get to iPhone levels they're never going to sell that many Macs that's just that's the end of it uh but I think if they could revisit that and sell a quality $500 machine where you kind of bring your own keyboard mouse and monitor um I think that there's a market for that just as I think that the 12-in MacBook really needs to hit that sub $1,000 price point that the MacBook Air continues to linger around at um they really need to find a way to to get to those lower price points in addition to continuing to off higher offer higher uh price points you saw that with the new Macbook Pro as well the touch bar was just too expensive and so Apple has continued to expand uh the lineup and and offer the low-end 13-inch model without the touch bar to get to those lower price points and uh you know I think that that that's in Apple's best interest uh longterm for all of its product lineups there's you know there's talk of a homepod mini so to speak uh maybe coming down the pike later this year or next year I I don't know if that's actually going to happen but you you and I have talked about it that $350 for the homod uh while a great value for what it offers in comparison to the competition is still too high for a lot of people to buy into that space especially if they want to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google that are really going on the cheap end certainly not saying that Apple should be selling a $50 model but uh I think that if they got under the $200 price point that that would do them some good $100 is an impulse purchase it is you you can walk into Target or Walmart or any one of the stories stores around and drop $100 on something and not feel too bad about it if you make it $130 that gives some people pause to think for a moment but it's still possible 150 bucks is probably where they would price such a thing yeah you look at what they did with the Apple TV you know that used to be an Impulse buy $99 and they've gotten away from that um I don't know that that's done them any favors um I think that that may may have hurt their market share as you know Roku and and Fire TV and and chomecast have uh have really taken the low end of that market I'm very happy with my Apple TV I like it a lot but you know I thought that they were smart when they kept the uh previous generation model around for $80 or whatever it was and they kind of silently 69 $69 yeah they they kind of silently discontinued it and and uh I think that's a shame um and I would like to see just as they've done with the iPhone an expansion of options if you want the $200 um high-end really great 4K Apple TV have at it um and if you want to just get in and have the Apple TV experience something simple um you just need HD um and you just need the basics Netflix and access to your iTunes library and stuff I would love to see a Sub h00 sub $100 price point for that product and and unfortunately they abandoned it and that's something I'd like to see them you know refocus on and get back to not just with the iPhone but with all their products absolutely you know that was what was great about that $69 Apple TV third generation was that it's it's obviously did Netflix and Tulu but when Amazon Prime released Prime video for Apple TV for the fourth generation it also appeared on the third generation devices and so that device serves a lot of needs if you have an Amazon Prime account you're taken care of if you have Hulu you're taking care of if you have Netflix job done uh it it really addresses a pretty wide swath of the core TV streaming audience right there you know and it's got the the outliers like crackle and some of those things it's got HBO on it so it's it's a good strong device for people who don't need to have the tvos app store right exactly and for most people they just want access to Hulu and Netflix and whatever well we'll get back to that a little bit we're going to talk about homepod more in just a moment but I wanted to mention uh so Warren Buffett has been you his Philosophy for investing he said for years is that if he would be willing to own the whole company then he's happy to own shares of it if he's not willing to own the whole company doesn't own shares of it right and he has just raised his stake in apple to uh 1653 million shares nice to be rich sorry I'm a little staggered by that um he he's dropped about 95 4.5% of their IBM hings and they they still have obviously some of those those IBM Holdings they got 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM M but uh they um no not 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM 4.5% remaining of their Holdings of IBM but yeah they have about 27.7 billion dollar worth of Apple as of trading yesterday yeah it's something um there's a lot there's a lot of uh volatility with apple lately and and the market in general obviously um there are a lot of investors who are focused on Apple as a growth stock and they obviously cannot grow forever um even though they continue to make money hand over fist so as we've talked about here many times uh Wall Street is kind of a sideshow joke when it comes to actually investing in companies for what they're worth as opposed to what the market wants so uh you know there are smarter people than me that make money on the market um I I don't invest in any specific tech stocks or anything like that um I'm just an observer uh but you know obviously Warren Buffett is uh earned his place as one of the respected guys on Wall Street um and he seems to know what he's talking about so I'm sure that makes feel in investors feel a little more confident um in times of volatility when uh he buys in so heavily to Apple yeah and you know you can see who how Apple's established their place in the market you can see who their competitors are and you can see how close or far their competitors are in terms of chasing them so knowing all those things and knowing a little bit about where Apple's trying to go in the future should tell you whether or not this is kind of an that Mak sense and for him it obviously is one that makes sense let's get to the main event let's talk homepod so the the the lead into this is before we talk about the reviews and the other things Apple watch airpods and homepod um they're predicted to rake in about 22 billion in Revenue by 2019 yeah that's what I was saying they're probably soon going to be bigger than the Mac um I I don't think that the homep Pod is going to be the biggest chunk of that the expectation is that the Apple watch will be um higher volume higher margin but the airpods are a big part of that too but homepod will contribute and the reason all those are lumped together is because Apple doesn't give specific sales figures for those devices they have historically given specific sales for the iPhone iPad Mac um but they do not give specific sales for iPods any longer uh Beats headphones airpods that sort of stuff so it's all lumped into a category called other products um and if you watch Apple's uh numbers every quarter that other products continues to grow uh and I think the biggest piece of that pie is the Apple watch and continues to do very well but certainly homepod will be a contributor going forward absolutely I mean the Apple watch is set to swallow up all of the Swiss watchmaking industry as a whole it's going to be bigger in terms of numbers than Swiss watches yeah yeah it's it's pretty impressive that they can get that many people to spend that much money on a watch um you know I would be curious to see uh what the average selling price is what models people are going for how many people are getting the the you know uh old series one model that continues to be sold um at a discount price or uh you know who's opting for the newer model with LTE that sort of stuff so um I I don't know what they're selling at um certainly they came in pretty aggressive with the high-end edition gold models you know up to $155,000 and then quickly scrapped that and went for the ceramic ones but I think they've been feeling their way around the market and seeing what's what works and what does not yeah all right this is the main event the main event is your homepod review yes tell me about it uh so I came away of of two minds about the homepod and um you know obviously when you write for an Apple website uh people are going to be very upset when you don't love everything that Apple does I'm outraged we are obviously an independent website and our duty is to our Readers first foremost but not just the most loyal Apple Fans but also people that just are curious about certain products and whether it's right for them and so I try to write my reviews with that in mind but also to be honest about you know how I feel um and how it fits into my lifestyle and so it's difficult because I don't like to make myself the centerpiece of a review I don't like to talk much about myself I'd rather just be kind of anonymous and just kind of put it out there and and give an honest assessment and be done with it I I never got into this business in an attemp to be a personality I can assure you of that um so anyhow but the problem with this product was the way that I listen to music and the way that I use speakers and AirPlay and Siri is so specific to me and the things that appeal to me about the homepod and the things that I don't care about with the homepod um weigh so much on my thoughts about the product that uh I had to really get into that personal side of what homepod is for me what I want it to be how I use it where I see it going Etc um and so this is one of the more personal reviews that I've written just because I think that that weighs so much and I and I hope that when somebody reads it you know they're not dwelling so much on on my taste in music or anything else really uh they're just focused on whether or not my take on it is applicable to them because I think some people are going to get a homep pod and absolutely hate it and some people are going to get a homep pod and just adore it and they may have very use cases than the other person that lead to that you know somebody looking for a personal assistant that's going to give them the weather and tell them jokes and stuff like that may not be as happy with the homepod as somebody who just wants a really easy to use plug-and-play quality sounding speaker so it's a it's a complicated product and in much the same way you know that the the Apple watch um recently took some time to find its footing as for what its strengths were and why you would want one um I think that there's going to be some growing pains with the homep Pod and if you know what you're getting uh and you really want a a quality speaker that's just easy and you can just put it in a room and just use it and it sounds great I think you'll be very happy with the homepod uh but if you're looking for something a little smarter a little more advanced um or even a little more technical um you're you're probably going to be lacking on this and may want to wait uh until those inevitable future software updates come and and add functionality to this which I think is just assume assumed to be in the works at this point but you know I came away of two minds about the product I love it for its design its sound its Simplicity um and I hate it for its Reliance on Siri I just absolutely find it to be a frustrating experience a lot of the time okay so I ended up giving it 3.5 out of five in the end how how are you on Apple music because it also is somewhat relied on Apple music I don't use apple music but I do use iTunes match so um I'm about as aside from an Apple music subscription and a beats one listening habit I'm about as Allin as you can get on the Apple ecosystem I buy most of my albums from iTunes when I buy digitally sometimes I'll buy from other sources like U you know band camp or something like that um or I buy a lot of vinyl and I get digital download codes and then I'll upload the digital copy to my iTunes match account so I don't have access to all music so there are certain weird things like if you say Hey you know who play some music um it'll just start playing all of your music as opposed to if you have an app music account then it starts playing your favorites or things that it thinks are your favorites I don't know why it can't do that with iTunes Match or just an iCloud music library that seems odd to me and then another thing that somebody in the comments uh said worked for them but did not work for me was I kept trying to have the homepod play the latest album by an artist so I don't know the names of albums a lot of times and I like to listen to albums from start to finish I don't want to just listen to random songs from an artist um I don't want to listen to a playlist I want to listen to an album start to finish the way that the artist intended but you know I listen to a lot of music and and I can remember artist names but I can't remember the name of an album I don't know what the name of the album is it's just kind of like I'll scroll through my music library and I'll recognize the art and go yeah that one and then play it so I found myself trying to talk to the homepod and say play the latest album by and it turns out that command just doesn't work and I don't know why um and then somebody in the comments said that they have apple music and it works fine for them so I guess if you pay Apple $10 a month and you can get better Siri function I don't know all my albums have years on them you know even then it should just default to the one that was most recently added to the library it has stamps on all these files so I can't I can't imagine why it doesn't work but to me stuff like that is so basic and so simple that it's frustrating when it doesn't work look we we know that there are a number of Siri fails we know that Siri doesn't get the right answer whether it's answers that it needs to search the web for or answers that it should just know locally based on your music collection Siri's got problems they have to address this a bunch of people in the in the comments on my review were angry and said that I should have given the product two scores one as a speaker and a music listening device and the other one as a personal assistant and these people are inevitably Apple Fans who want the product viewed in the way that is favorable to the product well no no they want the product viewed in the way that apple is pitching the product and apple is pitching the product as a fantastic Quality Music speaker first and by the way it's also got assistant and here's the problem with that logic that's wrong here's the problem with that logic you the primary way of interacting with a device is by talking to Siri so by saying that you have to rule out the smart functions of it is not fair because even if I were to ignore the fact that it can't do basic things like set two timers or really talk to my phone in a meaningful way or communicate with third party apps I still have to talk to the stupid thing to get it to play music unless I want to pull out my phone and it doesn't understand me like half the time and part of it and this is again why I got kind of personal in the review because part of it may be that I listen to a lot of lesser known and obscure artists having said that the stuff is not really that hard to to pronounce or figure out and so you know I was doing things like play the latest album by and then say it would just play all the songs by okay fine that that works but then I had the name of the album wrong on one case so I was uh looking to play an album the latest album by a band called The go team and so I was telling the hod uh play the latest album and just said okay playing all songs mine then none of them were the latest album okay fine so I'll try again so I was trying to remember the name of the album without pulling out my phone and I said uh Play Mayday by the go team and the First Choice was uh I think 18 Visions which is like a very loud hardcore band which is not nearly the same genre even close it doesn't even sound like what I was requesting mayday by the go team somehow turned into 18 Visions so so it misheard you in that case and then I asked again a second time um to play Mayday by the go team and it said uh that uh it was playing uh tame and paa as an artist um not even close again and then so I pulled out my phone and it turned out that the the problem was me I I was saying the wrong album name I was saying uh Mayday when in fact the first song on the album is called Mayday and the album name is actually semi Circle um but but here's the thing is that it should know they should have thought of the idea that you are placing the importance on the artist name and So within the priority of the artist name it should then find things that match or close as opposed to placing the priority on the first search term which was Mayday I I don't know where it got those connections I don't know you know and and the thing is it it it seems Siri seems more aggressive on the homep Pod so it used to be that it would say um she's assertive now it it would say I don't I don't know or I can't find that but now it just goes well this is probably close enough and then just throws something out there so I was trying to I would argue that that's the right answer and I'll tell you why I think that if you put this product out there in the world and you shipped it out and you gave it to reviewers and you put it in people's hands and their experience was comprised of I don't know or would you like to search the web or I can't find that or any of these these definitely not encouraging statements right that that would be the joke on Saturday Night Live that would be everyone's impression that Siri is a smart speaker who doesn't know anything right so here they've decided to shortcircuit that to prevent that from happening by simply they've asked for music We don't know what music but we're going to play something and they do it so that you don't get this Siri doesn't know anything response paried everywhere you know um like my wife came home from work last week and I just sit up the home pot it was Friday and she's like how does it work and so I put out a request and I I wanted to play a new album that I just got from a band that I saw a few weeks ago called fruit and flowers so I put in a request for that and it said okay playing LCD sound system and it's like these don't even sound alike like they're not even close I didn't and it wasn't even I didn't even ask for an album I just asked for the artist name because I only have one album by them and it just it just it's not even close like not even in the same ballpark I don't I don't know where it comes up with these conclusions uh where these artist names are are being mixed up and they really need to have some sort of a way to train it to understand um uh like I have a artist called laloo that I'm seeing this weekend and I wanted to listen to them the other day and if I spell it out and I say play artist L A LZ it goes okay playing laoo but if I say Play laoo It's doesn't understand it tries to play something else every single time it it does not understand that and it's like you you know how to pronounce it because I hear you say it back to me I know that we're pronouncing it the same way um so first of all it gave a bad demonstration for your wife yeah which not not a fantastic first impression there and second of all so my my experience in my house is if I have something set up and it fails either in the demonstration or in the first time that someone on the house besides me tries to use it that that is it no one else tries to use these things ever again yeah you get one shot is that the same thing with your wife is that is that also true in your house she hasn't really used it very much um I don't know how much of that is because she um I don't know if that's because she wasn't involved in the setup process or or what but I mean it's only been a week I imagine that you know it'll be integrated more into our life as we go um I've been using it a lot for homekit which is great but I know the specific commands that it wants for homekit and everything is easily pronounced right is another thing that I am disappointed in with homekit and Siri is that if I tell it that I want to turn if I have one smart door lock and I've named it door I should be able to say open the front door and it should also understand that that might be the same thing right having to know the exact names of the devices throughout your house is is kind of a burden and it doesn't help you the idea is that these smart assistants are supposed to be able to take the imprecise language input and handle it and by requiring specific naming like that it falls apart the funniest uh example was uh and you waited on the comments on this too because internet commenters don't get me wrong I love everybody that reads Apple Insider and I love the passion and enthusiasm that people have when they when they come to the comment section no I really do HA them no I I genuinely do and I enjoy engaging the comments but what people don't understand is sometimes when we go in and we try to clean up the comments or we try to fix it uh there are certain people that come in and just derail the discussion and it just goes down a road to talking about things that don't really matter they bring they bring in a flaming bag and leave it there in the comment section for everyone to look at and the worst part is when it's one of the first comments on the article it's the first thing everybody sees and if you come to the comments and don't comment yourself you just read them and you just see it immediately get derailed you're like oh jeez you know it's like there's no intelligent discussion being had you walk away you go elsewhere and so in my review and I wrote many words about the homepod and one sentence just to laugh about how silly Siri can be sometimes um I was trying to play a band called patio and I played the band and Siri understood and played the band but the problem was uh Siri tells you what she's about to play before it starts playing and so she goes okayy Siri play artist patio okay I'm playing patio yeah she says I've just given away a joke I'm sorry I'm playing I'm playing patio not patio patio and it's like I've never heard that pronounced that way uh somebody in the comments had to weigh in and say that that's the way that it's apparently pronounced in Spanish even though my wife speaks Spanish as her first language and said that that's not entirely accurate because it has a different number of syllables in Spanish neither here nor there uh the the fact of the matter is there should be some sort of way for Siri to learn and some sort of option for you to say okay you're saying that wrong or you're hearing me wrong or I want you to learn this phrase there needs to be some sort of programmable custom way of saying get this right I know they do it with names and stuff on your contacts on that's also inconvenient right that's also and and also fraught with problems I mean if you could say Hey Siri pronounce patio patio and it would get it and it would say okay I'm learning that now that would be fine because I have a friend whose name is AAL mhm and if you try and and tell Siri to dial a all she doesn't get it and if she does slightly understand it at all she pronounces it eel yeah well I don't want to call an eel I don't need an electric eel I want to call my friend AAL and I have tried to put it in phonetically I have tried to create a nickname I have tried to sort this thing out and um in in the end I've just given him an American sounding name that I know is his name when I want to call him which is dumb but Siri doesn't know how to pronounce it yeah and never will and and that's what's so frustrating um you know I another one I was there was a mashup album I tried to play called wugazi It's a combination of the wuang clan and fugazi and the first time it tried to play t and Paula I guess it likes to play that a lot and then the second time it tried to play songs by the artist fugazi which I understand I mean they sound very similar at that point they're just one letter off um but it it's still there should be a way for me to say no no no I want you to learn this band name so that in the future I can easily play it there's got to be some sort of a training thing added to it because everybody's going to have their own it's it's there's no way that Apple could possibly program every artist that's ever existed for everybody's obscure music libraries you know they can go in and manually make sure it understands Lady Gaga but I have I have the solution Neil yeah just as Apple gave us the You2 album yeah apple can give us Eddie Q's iTunes library oh okay and we can just happily everyone listen to the things that edq list yeah yeah great can't wait and then Siri will understand every one of them it'll be perfect it's going to be lots of Cold Play on there I'm kind of okay with that are you cold play is terrible stop it please good Lord no no thank you uh oh fine no and again I don't want this to devolve into you know artists that you listen to who has more street cred when it comes to music or whatever the simple fact of the matter is you have to use Siri to interact with this thing in a meaningful way and I have found myself using my phone to select artists to then use the homepod as an airplay speaker rather than than speaking to the homepod I find myself speaking to it more for homekit controls and not speaking to it for music controls because I don't know the name of the albums and when I try to guess the name of the album I can't get it right and even when I do know the name of the album I can't get it to work and so there's just too many points of failure at this point and so it's really disingenuous to say you should review this product with different scores for different functionality because you could say that about any of Apple's products you know the first iPhone should have been given three scores one is a internet Communicator one is a telephone and and one as a as a widescreen iPod you know like come on just because a product does multiple things doesn't mean that it should be graded on a curve on certain parts of that it's a great speaker it's a great simple speaker it sounds very good um it's not going to be the best sounding speaker you've ever heard but it's $350 for something that you can just put in your house and have it fill the room and sound fantastic so you know so here here's my concern I am kind of concerned by the that this thing was released too early and and I say that based on the Siri interaction and control part of it yeah and you know the old Apple and and I hate to say it but you know if Steve were still around no but the old Apple would have told us repeatedly that they don't release things until they're ready and well how old is Siri now old enough to know better that's the point old enough to be sent to a room at you can't really say you can't really say that they don't release it till it's ready because Siri's been around a long time and still has all these problems yeah and and that's a problem because of Apple's data collection policies and the fact that they put the consumer first and so the thing that is in many ways Apple's greatest strength and the reason that I'm willing to put a homep in my house and not an Amazon Echo is ironically the thing that holds them back because yes but I don't as a consumer I don't have to care why it's not working it's just freaking not working absolutely so I I want to move quickly to a reader review of homep we were sent an email and you you you saw this email this is from one of our listeners and I really like this guy a lot and so he starts off by saying that he's an Apple guy through and through he has been since ' 87 he is returning his homepod and he is highly disappointed which are are sharp words highly disappointed we don't take that lightly it sounds fantastic it's outstanding but the implementation is awful now he he knew it was an Apple device going into it he knew there was no way to get external audio into the device other than over AirPlay and things like that got over that uh he's got an Apple TV based living room this is fine but he's having difficulty with the way that iOS handles AirPlay if you're using an application that uses the video or the TV app the iOS device thinks that you're moving both the audio and the video to the airpod which means you get the audio coming through the speaker but a black screen with an AirPlay symbol which is not optimal at all and you know it it seems like they ought to be able to do the kind of thing that an Apple that a Google chomecast does where you can tell a chomecast to do something on the TV and it goes ahead and opens it on the TV so you ought to be able to have the audio route to the airpod and the video route to an Apple TV for example I mean it needs to tie more into the ecosystem in general you know we've talked about this before I think we talked about last week there's no reason that I can't say you know send directions to this place to my phone and then I walk out the door and then 10 minutes later I pull out my phone and I can see where I'm going you know like well and they already do that with the maps application on Mac OS if you're going ahead and and locating directions on Mac OS Maps it sends it to your pH and all this stuff is connected you know there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to say I want to watch something on TV have it dim the lights have it turn on the Apple TV the Apple TV is HDMI CEC connected so it can turn on your TV and switch it to the right input and then you know it should just be able to load the right app and and you know the TV app integrates with things like Netflix and whatever if I say I want to watch stranger things the latest episode bam pop it up hul I want to watch Hulu I want to whatever wait TV app does Netflix well it does like it does kind of a limited TV app does TV app does Hulu video HB a few it does a limited Netflix integration but even still like Netflix has to get on it does but but the fact that they have all these pieces in place they just haven't like put the puzzle together you know um and you can see where it's going and you can see where it's going to be really cool where you can do all those things and all the platforms talk to one another and it's really just um seamless you don't think about this is my Apple TV this is my homepod this is my phone whatever um all the devices talk to one another that that's where it's going we're just not there yet all right point two of of uh our listener letter it cannot be used to place phone calls it can be a speaker phone but you have to place or answer the call on your phone and then route it to the homep you and I did a speaker phone call with it last week that's literally the only time I used it and it was so insignificant to me that I didn't even mention in the review I I I just don't care okay but when we did that call um I called you from bone conducting headphones did you then have to I was using bone conducting headphones which which sounded great to my the side of my head I can't say sounded great to my ears because they were't in my ears but um you know we were confirming that the microphone wasn't amazing and did you when you answer the call have to Route it to the IP I change the audio Source just like you would you know yeah with any other exit with any other headset okay but you know if you have the airpods you don't have to do you do sometimes I mean it'll pop up and say what what audio Source do you want okay but if you can you but you can use have the airpods and place the call directly over them so the airpods are a little bit better for placing phone calls than the homepod is I mean I guess if you talk I'm just trying to clarify and make sure that we're we're agreeing with our listener letter here yeah um I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next point this this is one that that is also just one of these details right uh it works with iTunes on the Mac but he could not set it as a destination for all system audio I don't know why he couldn't I can okay so you can you uh you what you option click on the speaker at the top of set your okay right so if you have air foil as a third party thing on your your Mac you can go ahead and do that yep um and that's how I did the record player tip too now if I'm in system preferences sound and the output see regular airpl speakers I'm showing headphones I see regular air play speakers but I don't see the homod okay so you need to have air foil in order to be able to yeah I don't know why it's blocked out because I have 1 two three four five different uh AirPlay options on my Mac right now so my homepod is technically the sixth uh but I don't see that as a system output option okay I'm looking at my list I have two Apple TVs and a speaker that I was not fully aware was actually an airplace speaker to be honest I'm kind of surprised to see that there I have a I have a jam voice which is a Amazon Alexa enabled Bluetooth Wi-Fi portable speaker device and so I've always used that as as a portable Bluetooth speaker and also an Amazon Alexa device but it's showing up here in system preferences as an AirPlay device which pretty Co is totally wild to me I had no idea literally just discovered now so I I would say that three is mostly true for him because you know you expect to be able to do that out of the box and airplan speakers do that out of the box this one does not so air foil is required as a third party thing to make that work um so his his conclusion was that he felt like it was a speaker for Apple TV only and that the iOS implementation and the implementation in TV us were you know he felt the TV tvos implementation was complete and functional the iOS implementation was Half Baked and Mac OS was was not baked at all it's not as a home theater speaker anyhow so who cares if it'll connect to your Apple TV well I mean if you want really good sound out of it it's it's not a bad if you're watching TV you want distinct channels anyhow so I mean film has had stere film and television have had stereo sound for a very long time and at the base you want at least you know 2.1 sound for a good quality but you know for like for example my setup is 5.1 sound and you can go as high as like 9.2 sound now two so you know I I have a 7.2 receiver and the the honest truth is I only have 2.1 connected I have a a 7.2 receiver and I have 5.1 connected so I I was going to do the rear channels and and add a center channel to it and I was getting ready to do it and my wife just said don't bother and the truth is 2.1 Serv fine but you you do want distinct channels left and right when you're watching television um you know even a soundbar stretches the distance to have some space between them um you know I I so how is homepod at at beam forming to get some what stereo separation it's not stereo separation at all it's really just uh it's sound that fills the room but when you have something that's small you can't have true stereo sound you won't be able to do that until they allow that capability with a future software update and airpl 2 officially launches um but there was a guy uh I got to give a shout out in the comments um uh he goes by the name dick applebomb um and he uh used air foil and then created uh he has dual air foil apps playing Stereo One balanced all left the other all right used with two homepods so he's actually getting right now true stereo sound out of two homepods I thought that was really cool yeah it is um right so I am cool with this I'm not going to give away our our listener's full name because I didn't ask permission if I could talk about it but uh I I I really want to thank this listener for writing in and you know I I know you're out there and I I want to thank you again cuz this has been and we love having those different opinions and that goes again back to my review and why I like the homepod so much I mean we spent so much time here complaining about Siri but the truth is I love my homepod and the reason that I love it so much is because I love listening to music I love having good sound I love the Simplicity of it and I am potentially the world's biggest home or uh AirPlay fan I have been using AirPlay for many years um I really enjoy it and so to have uh an an expansion of the airplay lineup um and to have a new way and knowing that AirPlay 2 is coming uh I'm very excited for the future potential that my my donon receiver does AirPlay I have AirPlay speakers throughout my house but uh I quickly see my homepod becoming my go-to airplay speaker for a lot of reasons um including the fact that I assume that Siri is going to get better and I'll be able to talk to it and just it'll work and then I can use it with homekit and say you know play music in the kitchen play music in the bedroom whatever I'm excited about all that and I love I want to have a home pod in every room in my house I want to have multiple ones in one room uh it just it needs to get better it's just not it's a great product for an Enthusiast like me who is pretty much the quintessential target market for this device uh but uh it still has a lot of room to grow but thankfully with the A8 chip in it it really does have that room to grow it has the processing capability that I could see you know three years from now being a very different product than it is at launch yeah I I have to tell you I for years I pronounced the name of your receiver as Denon and and you've pronounced it as denan yeah I have no idea well I figured it out okay the the brand came from a merger of Deni ano mhm and so Den on is is the sort of correct pronunciation or Den so it's it's not denan but it's denki and ano so Den on Den on okay is where we go with that good to know well they make a great receiver that I'm praying when Apple releases AirPlay 2 is going to get updated to airpl 2 and then uh will presumably integrate with homekit and then I can tell it to uh play music in my living room and I'm very excited about that so what kind of furniture do you have your home pot on a wooden table and it does not have a ring on it okay now why would it have a ring on it the material that Apple used on the bottom where the subwoofer sound comes out uh can have a chemical reaction with some uh Furniture fin polish yeah um and uh unfortunately it leaves a ring uh there were some other articles that came out this week that showed that the Sonos one does the same thing and leaves a ring I guess it's just a standard material the same silicone material yeah it's unfortunate and if it messes up your table and and annoys your wife uh that's really unfortunate um it's an oversight by Apple I don't see this as being that big of a deal put a coaster under it I mean who cares um in other news Neil Hughes and I will be kick launching our Kickstarter for homepod coasters I I I don't think that this is a particularly big deal um but if it messed up your table uh you might be upset about that and I understand that but Apple's advice is to move it and polish it and put it on something so if you're putting it on a wood table and you're worried about it uh you know put a place mat under it you'll be all right right and the reason that they used this material is because they want to dampen vibrations they don't want the speaker to be buzzing on top of the furniture they want to be dampened and so you need to use some kind of material that will dampen vibrations and silicone is a reasonably good choice for that correct except when it leaves marks on your furniture so that's that's the question and uh you know the right answer is to clean the surface with the furniture manufacturer's recommendation recommended cleaning process and then it should be okay some of the testers that tried it so that didn't really clean it up very much and they're going to have to resand their table which is terrible I'm not going to I'm not going to before you sand a finish I would be tempted to polish a finish and not polish it with something like a you know a Johnson wax furniture polish kind of thing but to polish it with a um with a light car polish like a scratch removing car polish because that is a very light abrasive that will just take off the top surface without damaging the Finish below it and so you know you can um you can polish something up and and not have to sand it all mhm you know sanding and refinishing is annoying now where I would say to be careful with that is if you have an open grain wood then the Polish fills the Grain and you have a problem with polishing the grain you got to get out but it it's um you know use your best judgment uh govern yourselves accordingly but I would say do less rather than more and taking sandpaper to Wood means you've got to refinish the whole thing which can be kind of a pain right and and it's a shame that anybody has to do this in the first place absolutely so I can see why people would be upset or frustrated about this it does not affect me and I can't imagine it's going to affect a lot of people mine has been sitting on a wood table since day one um and I flipped it over once this came out to see if there were any stains there are not all is good yeah now Consumer Reports also gave their review of homepod they did it's a fact they did and they have a history of giving glowing reviews to Apple products they don't they I mean they they they have loved no I'm sorry got to take that back they they haven't loved they used their web page to get a lot of attention over the iPhone 4 and aate they have talked at length about the 2016 MacBook Pro where they used a test for battery performance that that made them withdraw the recommendation for the laptop and they also uh did dramatic testing for the iPhone 10 and found all sorts of unique ways to damage it as a part of their review and they went ahead and they wrote up and issued their Consumer Reports homepod review very quickly after they got the units same day and and they gave glowing reviews to the home Max and the Sonos one they said that the homepod sounded worse than the other two and that flew in contrast to basically every impression that was on the internet and here's the thing Consumer Reports is certainly entitled to their opinion I have no problem with them saying that the Google home Max is a better speaker um but you have to take it all in context uh they published their Impressions declaring quite definitively in a headline that the home Max sounds better than the homepod and the Sonos one sounds better than the homepod after a day of testing it okay um but again back in 2010 they were the instigators of the so-called antenna gate controversy with the iPhone 4 a couple years ago when the MacBook Pro came out they declared that it had poor battery life only 4 hours and it turned out that they had a developer setting enabled in Safari that was ruining the battery life that they went out of their way to flip on um and then like you said the iPhone 10 tumble test they simulated falling down like 50 flights of stairs or something and it's like what like nobody's phone is going through this kind of situation anyhow they have a history of kind of stirring the pot when it comes to Apple products and they also ially will wait you know a month or two after testing something to issue a definitive statement and this time they did something the day of and so all those factors combined led to uh Mike worthley uh who's an editor with apple Insider writing an editorial and I don't want to speak too much on his behalf because it's his editorial but um just to summarize his point uh you know Consumer Reports is a history of uh riling up Apple Fans um people that are following closely that are into Apple products don't necessarily take Consumer Reports too seriously because of uh the antenna gate and everything else that they've done over the years and on top of that uh they usually wait a while and do extensive testing before coming up with a definitive conclusion but this time they on the same day ranked the Google home Max as inferior or as superior to the homod so all that led Mike to write an editorial just pointing out all these facts and saying you know you know what's going on here I want to point out so they also ranked Sonos one as Superior to homepod right John McFarland who is the found of Sonos he he's retired from his CEO role now but but he did that in in last spring mhm he found that one Sonos one against one homepod the homepod was Superior so when the founder of Sonos tells you that the homepod is the better product one for one well it costs $150 more so I mean no no but I mean the the the qual there's something to be said for this right yeah so we when after Mike published this after we published this M Consumer Reports responded on Twitter no they they issued a press release go D tell I'm rubbing my hands together listeners yeah Consumer Reports issued a press release uh disagreeing with Mike's editorial saying that uh uh that they were disappointed um and accusing um Apple Insider and and Mike specifically of not giving them an opportunity to comment before it ran the editorial now uh Mike that's also not true Mike Works directly for me and he took me through the process process he went to their website they have a form there where they say all press inquiries should go through he filled out the form he put a return email address of news at Apple insider.com which is how you reach us uh and did not get a response uh for about 12 hours before we hit the publish button on that on that editorial so um I commented just uh uh responded back to Consumer Reports and just said uh you know our editor Mike worthley did actually request comment before this editorial went live um and uh there is a very clear proven public uh number of examples of of consumer reports making controversial decisions when it comes to Apple products whether or not you disagree with them uh it's not up for debate that they have upset apple and upset Apple Fans many times over the years through what people viewed as unfair assessment of their products um but having said all of that uh I welcome the opportunity to talk to consumer reports more they've certainly never given us comment in the past but they felt compelled to write an a press release about us so you know um I would like to go to their Labs can we go to their Labs I would love to I I would love to work with uh Consumer Reports I'd love to find out what they do because again I don't care about their assessment of the homepod that doesn't it doesn't matter to me if they don't like the homepod uh the problem is to a lot of people it looks like they have an agenda it looks like you know maybe uh maybe complaining about Apple products puts more eyeballs on on their stuff I don't know I don't I don't know what it is but uh you know where there's smoke there's fire there have been a few instances of these kind of things going on and it's not new and it's happened a few times and uh I'm not trying to question The credibility of them there or anything like that but it was odd that they published the same day uh that the speaker came out with a definitive conclusion which is not the consumer reports style usually they take a while to do it I don't know why they did it that way and we asked them why and they didn't really give us a clear answer so um despite the hu and cry and and the press release being issued and everything else we don't really have a clear explanation as to why they even told us they're working on a formal review that's forthcoming but in their you know first hot take on it the day of uh They said that the gum home Max sounds better and the Sonos one sounds better even though basically no reviews came to that conclusion they're the only ones that hold that conclusion so uh a little bit of controversy this week uh it was interesting um and I think uh hopefully cooler heads prevail in the end I'm not looking to pick a fight with Consumer Reports believe me um but you know I I just think that I think that uh uh I think that they deserve to be called out and questioned for the way that they handled that one now you said earlier that you have unique ways of using your homepod that you listen to music in unique ways I've been experimenting with it seeing what I can do with it so so how are you getting vinyl to homepod so to take a step back people keep complaining about homepod and how limited it is and how limited the access who it is and if you don't have an iPhone you can't use it well that's not entirely true or apple music if you don't have apple music you can't use homod again I don't have apple music not just I'm just repeating the words I know yeah um what people who are saying that don't realize and as somebody who has used AirPlay for a long time back when it was known as air Tunes um AirPlay has been around for a long time and it's been reverse engineer and hacked to death to the point now where there's a whole ecosystem of uh products and and applications and devices that tap into AirPlay in very interesting ways um and it's a very robust ecosystem if you know where to look to really get a great whole home speaker experience and even cheaper than you could with competing services like Sonos um so I'm a big airplane Enthusiast and I have a whole homeful of AirPlay stuff and I've done stuff like this in the past just kind of as a proof of concept because like you and like of our readers I'm guessing I'm just a nerdy guy who likes to go oh I wonder if I could do this I you know it's I wonder if I could do this and then you try it and lo and behold it works and you get a sense of accomplishment out of that so anyhow I have a uh cheap little record player that was given to me as a gift uh it's a Sylvania record player um it costs like $40 on Amazon it's not particularly great sounding or high quality record player but it offers a lot of unique features it has a built-in speaker so um you could just uh bring it with you and have batteries in it and just play music if you really want to bring your records with you out on the go or something um it has auxiliary out so you can plug it into other devices or speakers or whatever but it also has USB out and it also connects to a Mac with drivers and you can use it as audio line in so if you connect the USB port on the Sylvania player to your Mac you can then do whatever you want with that audio so one of the uses that would be obvious would be to have something that was only released on vinyl and you don't have a digital copy of it you want to convert it you could then play the record record it and have a digital copy of it one of the things you can do if you get a little clever is use an app like air foil which we mentioned before which is a third party app from a great developer called rogba yeah that's Paul cass's U company they've been around for a long time and they make a lot of great products but some of the great things that they do are AirPlay related so they I met I met them back at macor in the old days actually oh nice I they were I was tweeting with them uh uh a few days ago they were Thanking us for writing articles about them and they do great stuff this is not they're not paying me or anything like that I just really think they do a great job we again about audio hijack and their loop back applications but like Paul is a great guy yeah and uh they have a whole Suite of AirPlay application so you can turn um any device that you have into an AirPlay receiver you can turn your iPhone into an AirPlay receiver so start music on one device or take an old iPod touch or an old iPhone and have it plugged into something and it would receive music and you could use it as an AirPlay receiver and plug speakers into it or whatever you can do all kinds of crazy stuff cool stuff like that it works on Windows it works on Mac and you can get the the main air foil and Linux and you can get the main air foil app for your Mac and then you can use any device and if you wanted you know a midi controller for an instrument or whatever and then use that line in capability with air foil to beam any audio to your homepod so just as a proof of concept uh I did it now you I mean obviously there's some limitations there's some lag there's this there's that um but it's cool um I connected my record player to my Mac and then I used air foil to beam it to my homepod and there I was listening to a record player on my homepod so for all the naysayers out there who say that the homep Pod is limited and you can't connect to things and you can't do things with it I say that's hogwash I say if you want to get a little clever with it and it doesn't really take much time or effort or money um you can do some really cool things and listen to basically whatever music you would want on your homepod uh there are AirPlay hacks on Android and if you wanted to use an Android device to stream music to it you could uh homepod works very well with AirPlay and AirPlay has been hacked to bits and uh un unpacked and and repurposed in all kinds of cool ways and it's a lot more connected than you realize awesome well next up we have a very special thing we have an interview with the number one Comedy album on iTunes we have the comedian himself coming on the show and that's going to be very special so I'd like to welcome a very special guest to this segment of the Apple Insider podcast joining us now is Will Ables and will is the the holder of the title for having a number one comedy album on iTunes yep and hi welcome that's that's got to be really cool seeing yourself in iTunes and seeing yourself alongside other people that that you know you you might never think to be in the company of oh yeah that was definitely the uh the coolest part I mean the original goal was like all right let's see if we can break the top 10 um because just the names that were surrounding me were so they're you know your idols and people that you one day hope to become I mean it was uh like Adam Sandler was on there John malany Jim Gaffigan so I was like looking at those names and I was like all right well maybe maybe the top 10 and then when it debuted number one uh I just couldn't believe it it was it was just surreal but let's let's back up a little bit because you know you said maybe the goal is to to break the top 10 but before that how did you get from performing to the goal of making an album yeah uh so the way it all kind of came together was uh I run a show in New York uh it's a monthly standup show called hey guys and we were celebrating the one-year anniversary of it and so we put together this kind of Allstar showcase and then I was going to do a new half hour at the end of it and a friend of mine who's a musician and a producer just on a whim was like oh I'd like to record it you know I want to practice recording and so I said all right I could you know if it comes out well enough maybe we can release it as like a half hour album and the show went well uh the recording was great but I just didn't quite have the set that I wanted so we booked the whole thing again we uh focused only on the album this time so that was nice so we separated ourselves from the show from hey guys and it was just the will Ables album recording and I booked a couple different Comics keeping in mind that I needed the energy to be high and I also didn't need them to steal the show so I I had to specify uh who who we booked based on that and we brought all the equipment back and I ended up you know recording 40 minutes uh got a great crowd in and yeah and then that was kind of the last easy thing to happen with the rest of the album release I I'm I'm sort of hesitant I kind of think I know where you're going with that but um you know longtime listeners of of this program know that from time to time we've had issues with recording equipment and audio production quality and and things that we've had to learn how to overcome so I'm I'm sort of I I got a I'm hesitant and at the same time I have to ask what happened next yeah so then now we're coming off of the the recording and just for um just so I could hear it before uh my producer before my co-producer sent me the uh the first recording I just happen to record it on my phone because I pretty much tape every set on my phone on my iPhone and I listened to it I was like oh this is great this sounds great I can't wait to hear what it sounds like with actual professional equipment and uh two days later I got a an email from from him and he was like Hey you're not going to believe this uh I wasn't uh so he he had a lot I don't want to throw him under the bus because it's not entirely his fault he had a lot of hats on yeah the thing to REM remember is that something always goes wrong and it's not exactly necessarily anyone's fault like there's nothing intentional but equipment fails or there's a human error or or whatever but there's there's a frequently a problem right yeah and so what happened is he he emails me and says hey so we lost all the audio um I was he was also filming it and he was like while I was filming I didn't notice that the audio that uh was connected to your microphone specifically turned off about halfway through the opener so we lost all of the audio for an album recording and you know I think in any other scenario or any other comic on the planet would have said well we have to record this again but I'm a fairly unknown comedian especially in the New York scene so I didn't think we could fill the room again for a third time that was kind of our big our big hurdle and I was like well let's just see what we can do with the audio from the cameras because we had two or three cameras running and so we took the audio off of that and that's the majority of the album and then because I happen to record it on my phone that was what we ended up using as the uh the constant through through the through the whole editing process so yeah we ended up using my iPhone recording and Camera recording the audio from the cameras and and you you sent me some notes from your co-producer and and they say you know we used a otu a mark of the Unicorn 8 pre- audio interface which is a fantastic interface two AK G c214 mics to capture the room sound and the board mix that had the microphone mhm running it all into Protools 12 you know you're you're using really top quality gear right the the the the equipment is not the problem you've got fantastic equipment you've got fantastic mics you've got a fantastic interface you've got all the things that you should have in place yeah and and the first time we recorded it with that exact same equipment the audio was fantastic it sounded incredible I I I was I mean listening to it with him I was like this this is so professional I mean I I feel like beyond my years in comedy just listening to this so it was so much more disappointing the second time around when he was like yeah I guess my computer turned off or I actually don't know what caused it to just turn off like that but yeah so that's that's ended up that's that's what ended up happening so there you have it you Ed the iPhone audio for your iTunes Al yeah yeah it actually sounded uh better than I expected better than I expected for sure and you know the iPhone itself is a fine recorder the the thing that it needs to have is a good mic and a good mic interface in front of it to really make it work well and uh you know I think I'm we can talk more about that offline but I want to give you some tips and see things that you could do just to have that always in your back pocket yeah no that'd be great um so the cameras you're using were the Canon 5D yeah you're pulling audio off of those wow yeah and the one thing with the with the 5D is that it and I'm sure you can adjust the settings but um we weren't really working with professional uh cameramen so we uh it turns off every 12 minutes it stops recording every 12 minutes or so so that was actually why we were lucky to have recorded it on my iPhone because the iPhone was a straight through 40 minute recording whereas the cameras it cuts off about every 12 minutes so we needed the iPhone to fill in that that kind of second that we were missing between each one so you used the camera audio and then filled in with the iPhone audio yeah yeah that sounds like a complex edit yeah I mean it he put it together in just in one sitting um because we kind of we also took it and just had to kind of say all right well we'll brand it as a live album because was at that point there's no way we can use the other recording from the first run because the audio was so vastly different um and you know he just he kind of raised the levels and he couldn't really get rid of uh too much of the like the the the room noises uh that was a whole another thing was that room was so much noisier than I had anticipated Just Between the buzzing of the lights the bar upstairs their Keg Room was downstairs so you can hear the co CO2 two popping uh at one point the show after us came in while I was finishing up and there they had a bag of balloons and the balloons hit one of the cameras so you have the sound of a balloon hitting a camera and those are the kind of things that he couldn't quite eliminate um so that was uh that was probably the next hurdle was okay it's a live album but it also sounds kind of crazy yeah and he did a lot of the cleanup for that in uh isotope rx6 yeah yeah using the fre weeks trial of it mhm and we we have a license for rx6 and use it here a lot it's really helpful for taking out Reverb and editing out single noises that occur and things like that you know I I take out sirens and stuff like that from time to time on Neil's audio Yeah and uh I think it's really impressive that you're able to use the the onewe trial of that to uh clean this up a lot yeah and I think that was one of the things I don't think um my first editor being my co-producer I don't know if he entirely knew how to use it because he was just using the trial so it was one of his first times using it uh and I think if he had a little more experience with it we could have definitely utilized it better but for what he did do with it it already sounded you know 100% better than what it did when we first started yeah the way that they do that product is they give a bunch of plugins that learn the audio process the audio and you you can use the defaults reasonably well and get pretty far just by clicking through you know three default presets and have it deliver the audio and that's okay that goes a long way and and honestly 90% of the time that's what I'm doing too uh but they make a uh a website for it called the RX cookbook and you can search the RX cookbook for specific examples of problems like the siren or a cat meow or a door Clos or or you know these kinds of noises and they tell you what to do to the presets to take care of those things and quickly teach you the product for the specific problem you're trying to solve for yeah I mean and that's that's great yeah it's a very cool thing so so you you lost all the audio you pieced it back together out of out of recording using the iPhones mic which is really quite incredible what are some of the things that you learn from this what what are some of the things that you do next time differently uh well I would definitely plan on recording it more than two times uh that was the biggest thing I took out of it uh was just because that's one of the challenges of um running longer comedy sets in New York is uh it's there's not a lot of opportunities to run more than 10 minutes so when I ran the half hour the first time that was pretty much the first time I'd run that half hour uh at least a new half hour so you know I wasn't really thinking ahead too much cuz again we weren't really planning on making this into an album so that was kind of the the problem but you know I would definitely have prepared myself uh a little bit more to have a couple of runs set up and recorded it maybe three or four times that's definitely something I would have done the comics I booked I would that's something I wouldn't change I definitely book them again and I think another thing would be just I felt a lot of pressure and it was all self-driven but I felt a lot of pressure to get the album out as quickly as possible possible and knowing what I what I know now I would definitely have just been a little more patient because the next step was going through the the publisher and I chose to use CD Baby and they're very hands-off uh and so that was a good learning experience for me but I definitely missed a few things you know cuz I felt like I was rushing through it and I was self-producing this album now through them for the first time ever so I probably if I could go back I definitely would have been a lot more patient and maybe ask a little more advice on how to go through the publishing process besides the the overcoming the recording fault and things like that what are the other reasons that you would book two shows for book three dates for why why would you record more than a couple of time more than once if you knew that you had the equipment all locked down um just you know some jokes just hit differently with different audiences and so by recording two or three times uh you have a chance to instead of having okay I know five out of these 12 jokes are this is the a material these are always going to hit these are always going to be big laughs you have a chance to get an audience in there that for a lack of a better word call it the B material the B material hits like a material and so then if you have two or three runs of it and you're lucky enough that every joke hit at least one time through that whole recording uh then you can start piecing it together and it sounds like every single joke was the biggest laugh you'd ever heard and that being said we had a great audience on both of them and spe specifically the second show every joke hit really well but I was also performing mostly in front of friends so that was another thing was it'd be nice to get a fresh audience in who maybe hadn't heard me before uh because some of the jokes I know specifically my roommate and my girlfriend were in the audience and they know these jokes better than anybody you know so it's um tough to to force a laugh when know the punch line I guess but that was one reason I would definitely uh try and record again just to try and piece together that that perfect every joke hit set so how how hard is it to get people to come to these kinds of things uh well New York specifically it's difficult because there are 8 million shows I mean there's you could go see seven shows a night if you wanted to and you probably would have missed some I mean that's that's what makes it really hard to fill seats because it's difficult to make uh the show stand out and you can book Comics that have been on Comedy Central that have you know maybe not necessarily been on Netflix because those guys are probably selling out Arenas and giant theaters on their own but you can have TV credited comics and because you're in New York no one no one cares everyone kind of takes it for granted they're like yeah I I just saw a TV credited comic at dinner tonight you know he's my friend that that kind of thing so no one's really impressed so that makes it really difficult and just yeah just the promotion aspect of it it's hard to rise above you know sure someone could go see my album recording but they could also go see Hamilton and that's that's really what makes it difficult to get butts and seats is most shows don't stand out when you're looking at the broad spectrum of what do I want to do tonight right it's hard to get your show uh recognized now you said one of the things that you wouldn't change were the people that you'd booked to to open for you yeah they uh they were fantastic so I booked uh she she's starting to she's starting to blow up a little bit her name's Caitlyn PFO I I booked her to host because she's super high energy uh very very funny and she's very kind she has a great uh point of view and just she has this this energy that just really can't be matched I mean I've never seen someone perform the way she does and she knows how to work a room so she can gauge the audience she can figure out okay where do where where where is this going wrong like what's going right and she can read them and she can see what they like and she'll Hammer at home and then the second comic was a guy named Joe Pera and Joe's a pretty big comic and he's got a really uh devout following and very unique guy he's got a lot of stuff on Adult Swim and I booked Joe because Joe is one of the funniest Comics I've ever seen but he has a very low energy uh so between him and and Caitlyn there was this kind of wave of energy and and laughter that I sort of preemptively calculated thinking okay Caitlyn's gonna come in she's gonna be big she's goingon to be loud she's going to be very funny and they're going to laugh really hard and then you have Joe who's going to keep riding that wave they're going to keep enjoying themselves a lot of my friends were there just to see Joe because he he's just that funny which is funny that you know that was that was another thing is when I booked it a second time I had to give my friends that went the first time an incentive to come so I booked Joe perah because just a lot of people love him and so I knew that yeah he would go second he would not be super high energy he wouldn't suck the energy out of the room but he would keep the laughs going he would keep them in it and people would really enjoy it and then Caitlyn had another minute or two to get the energy back up if she needed to and then I can kind of ride the momentum of the wave going back up and then I just go into my set and it worked perfectly I mean that actually worked which was nice to see that that wasn't some crazy Theory I had uh and they were just they were fantastic um you know and Joe had to Joe had to also kill a little time on his own and ended up singing Hang on Sloopy which was just if if you're a fan of Joe Pera just seeing him off the cuff start singing Hang on Sloopy was just the best part of the night so so why did that happen so again my producer is a music based and in comedy you know the way we kind of check each other make sure you know where you're at during the set so if you have a 10-minute set somebody gives you the light as we say at 9 Minutes usually and usually what that is it's just someone turns their cell phone on and they wave their cell phone at you so you know that you have one minute left and like in the old days waving a flashlight at you or something so that You' know that's your time yeah but yeah basically the the flashlight has been replaced with a a cell foam and again because was wearing so many hats between filming and recording and he was also teching the show when he held his phone up uh the light wasn't on and I obviously wasn't paying attention because I'm about to do 40 minutes of standup so my my my brain was elsewhere yeah you're preparing yeah and I did think at one point man Joe's um Joe's been up there for a while and finally Joe himself was like hey um how much time like how much more time do you want me to do and that's when Caitlyn was like I don't think the lights on I looked up and I see see my producer just shaking his phone and that's like oh so Joe has been up there for about 15 minutes but you know you wouldn't have known it until he asked and I'm glad he did and and that's what happened so the positive part was we got him to sing Hang on Sloopy out of it and everyone kind of got back into it and yeah that that was how it all went yeah nothing is easy in performing right there's always going to be something that happens no I mean we could have had a hundred people working on this and I'm I'm sure something else would have found its way in absolutely yeah from from there you you said you took it to CD Baby so what what happened going through CD baby cu you said that that was kind of hands off and you had to sort of um you know stumble through that yeah so um well actually one one thing I actually I forgot I kind of skipped over this um before I went to CD Baby we actually did have a second editor come in uh and that was when cuz we were talking about the RX isotope and he actually was a professional audio engineer so he also used that and then we ended up being able to clean up some of the things uh in the recording itself so I accidentally skipped over that yeah so I was about to go into CD Baby I was all excited we just gotten the copy back and then my girlfriend got home from work and she was like I was just talking to my friend and I don't know why you don't ask her boyfriend to do it who I knew and so he actually did get a hold of it and he spent 3 weeks on it cleaning it up um even more than it already was so he actually was the one that was able to get out the like air conditioning the room noise the you know the beer cans opening and all that and then when he got it back to me that was when we went into into CD Baby and so during the time he was uh editing I went through I asked a couple of other Comics that had released albums uh to see who they went through in terms of publishing and it kind of came down to tune core and and CD Baby and they're both great publishing uh websites but what it came down to was money and uh ton Corp takes a little more out of it and they have a yearly charge that they make and in my head I was like well I'm not going to make that much money off this so if I'm going to be charged yearly I'm going to end up losing a lot of money uh so I went through CD baby but that was the difference was there a lot more hands off um and so it comedy is interesting because it becomes a bit confusing cuz you're like well is this just comedy like is there a comedy section that I can edit this in or is or I can publish this through and it's you know a spoken word so then you start getting mixed in with the spoken word Group which could be yoga it could be poems you know so that was that was also hard to navigate and branding it live also took it to another level I mean it it was it was a lot of stuff that really I just really didn't understand while I was going through it as you can kind of tell by the way I'm wording this so how how about the promotion of it you've gotten it published you've gotten CD Baby figured out how do you promote it because it's it's one thing to go ahead and publish something but if if no one buys it you've just got a nice vanity project right right well and that was the part that I uh I'm probably the most proud of out of all of it was was the actual promotion because that was another another part where we or where I I made a plan and stuck to that plan and it actually worked out and so one thing I I started thinking about was okay how like how does this make a dent uh how does this you know get any recognition and I started thinking about who would want to listen to this and who would on top of that buy it and what I really kind of you know had this eye openening moment was well you know it was produced by myself and by friends the audience was the majority of them were my friends you know uh the people that were Ed it they were all my friends and I was like oh my friends my friends and family they're my fans at this point uh and so I went back to Maryland and I decided to consolidate so the first thing I did was I was like all right I'm I'm only going to promote it through iTunes um because just personally I felt that uh making a dent on iTunes meant more than than Amazon because iTunes is music you know it is it is comedy it is all these things you buy albums you listen to albums through iTunes whereas Amazon is everything on the entire planet and so I wanted to focus everything to be on iTunes and also just breaking into their top 10 was just would be a really cool thing to do and so I first Consolidated to that and then I went back to Maryland and I decided to really push home put sorry to really uh hammer at home and lucky I'm lucky enough that one of my friends from high school is now a news anchor on the local four state Channel and I got a hold of him and he sent me one of their their journalists and we put together this really really cool promotional piece for the uh for the album And She interviewed me and we did that all back home in my hometown and it was great I mean it got the word out to people that I that probably wouldn't have heard about it otherwise you know because unless you're my friend on Facebook or you follow like some very small blogs that were willing to help me out it's pretty hard to get it out there you know it's hard to it's hard to promote this outside of your bubble so I just decided to stay in my bubble and and hope that there were a couple people that just that hadn't really thought of me or I hadn't thought of them that were like oh okay yeah I'll check this out and it worked I mean and it ended up working it was it was cool I would get messages from people that I hadn't seen or even people from my hometown that I never even met that just were like hey this is so cool to see a HomeTown guy doing and that was kind of the goal was to reach out to them so it was great that we had this plan or I had this plan it actually came through and yeah and then the day of when it actually was released at number one that was that was the biggest shocker was just oh my God I made a plan and the plan worked you know after all the things we had to kind of stumble through with the audio and trying to figure out CD baby and all these things the one thing that really worked was the thing that mattered the most and that was the the promotion yeah yeah it was great describe for me the moment when you found out that it was number one oh this was a such a such such a moment to remember so the original date we wanted to release it was in November and like I said that was when we we I handed it off to a second editor and he had it then so I was like well I'm not going to rush through this and and so then I decided Well the album's called regrets of my father so the probably biggest regret my father's ever had was the day I was born wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute okay can I I know it's on the album can you give us a little bit of a teaser about that story you don't have to do the whole bit but just give us something to help us understand what that means oh well I mean you know it's purely uh purely a joke but uh you know if you look at my four siblings and I I'm the oldest of four and and you know my my brother who's right below me in terms of age he's a a scientist and my sister's going to be a teacher and well just looking back my priorities were never uh I guess what what my dad would have preferred I mean my dad was a big baseball guy he's a finance guy and I spent a lot of my time uh focusing on let's say the Arts I guess and uh I I guess the the biggest moment I think my dad had when he was like there's something up with this kid is I uh well I rewrote my own version of the hit play hit Broadway play cats and I think that was moment my dad was like all right so he'll probably play baseball for a couple years but um I think his uh his priorities are going to be elsewhere yeah and so that was kind of the and I just I just thought that out when we first when I first first made up this uh album title I just thought it was too funny um because my dad's always been very supportive and that is something that that comes around on the album as I talk about him trying to figure out how to raise me as a kid versus you know how supportive he actually was at the very end of it all uh but it just it just thought it was such a good album title for uh for a comic specifically you know and I think a lot of the lot of the guys and girls that do this can relate to it um but yeah and so then I decided to release the album on my uh on my birthday and there was a little there was a little bit of it too it was like well is either going to be a day a birthday to remember or a birthday that I'm very much going to want to forget and so it's the 20th it's December 20th and that was when all of a sudden you know I was very confident about everything I was confident that it sounded good I was confident about the promotions and I thought yeah we're going to break the top 10 and in the back of my mind I really wanted to be number one I was like I want to be the number one comedy album that's the goal but you know you don't you I was like my second goal is top 10 but I really want to be number one and then all of a sudden the day of you know it's going to be released at midnight and I just got that feeling in your stomach and I was like looking at the other guys in the top 10 and like I said it's guys like Jim Gaffigan and John Main and Adam Sandler and I was like how am I going to beat these guys you know and that just kind of kept growing and then I had a show that night as well and the show wasn't very good and I was like uh this is this is kind of weird I don't know I don't know and I was and there's a a comedy show around the corner from my from my apartment and I was going to go there so I could celebrate with other Comics at midnight and then all of a sudden I thought no because if this doesn't even break the top 10 what am I going to do I'm just going to be stuck there with everybody and so one of my friends came over my uh my girlfriend was here and my roommate was here and we're all sitting around waiting toward till midnight and my girlfriend has really long hours so she had to go to bed and my roommate he has long hour so he ended up going to bed and my friend had gotten off work and they had a long day so they had fallen asleep on the couch so so yeah so I'm sitting here you know we're watching a couple of Netflix specials or we is I at this point so I'm watching Rory scov cuz it was my favorite special of last year and it's like 11:58 I'm mentally preparing myself to not be in the top 10 but then to try and still enjoy my birthday and midnight hits I go to iTunes and I see my album cover is the Insignia 4 comedy albums on iTunes and I was like is that just because this is my iTunes or is that a good thing and so I click on it and I see the charts and I see that I'm number one and I just yell out oh my God I'm number one my my friend on the couch wakes up for a second and just was like oh happy birthday and I was like no you don't understand man wake up I was like the album's number one yeah so I run into my bedroom and I wake up my girlfriend and I was like hey the album's number one and she like yeah can I go back to sleep she's like oh happy birthday yeah so she wishes me a happy birthday I was like no I care about my birthday yeah and so she fall was asleep finally I calm myself down and I realized everyone in my apartment's asleep and I want to celebrate so I went into my Atrium I went out into the hallway which connects to all the other apartments in the building and I put my headphones on I brought my computer out and I ended up just you know tweet tweeting about it and Instagram putting stuff on Instagram and putting stuff on Facebook and just having a beer to myself sitting next to a pile of shoes and so you know you have this idea that you're going to be celebrating there's going to be champagne everywhere you know there's going to be great music playing and you're just going to be raging and instead you're sitting outside next to a pile of shoes drinking a beer watching Netflix on your computer but uh definitely will never forget it and it was just this feeling where I just I didn't know how I was going to sleep I was so excited and I couldn't wait to wake up the next day and then properly celebrate it with everybody when they were awake but yeah it was really it was really cool and it uh you know it stayed at number one for the full day uh I kept checking cuz I was like a there's no way it's going to stay there and it stayed there for 24 hours the next day it uh went between 2 and three which is also very cool just to stay there and then stayed in the top 10 for a couple of days and then and then it uh very quickly moved moved out of the top 10 and out of the charts entirely but uh it did a lot better I mean just staying in the top 10 for a couple days was also uh exciting because I didn't know how long it would stay in there and then to go from number one and then stay in there that was yeah it was all just unreal yeah I can kind of Imagine going and refreshing and just you know I gotta go check right yeah I'll be right back I gotta go check iTunes yeah and then uh you know being on my phone all day checking it on on my phone all day uh taking about 10,000 screenshots to make sure it was actually happening you know and sending it to people I me like this is this is real right this is number one right can you just do me a favor and go to iTunes and check for me yeah yeah yeah just make sure it's not mine I want to make sure it's not my computer it's actually on everyone else's although if we could do that that would be a really fun practical joke oh that be horrible be terrible uh yeah would would be funny really demoralizing wouldn't it yeah it' be funny years later like years later I'd be like a that's a pretty good prank but uh it would probably take couple couple of sessions in therapy and uh yeah a couple years to distance myself before I'd really find a humor in it good way to make enemies though yeah it's a great way probably the best way this has been a lot of fun for me I've really enjoyed having you talk to me about this um I I really think that uh promotion is probably one of the most difficult Parts you know the the production and things well I say that and I'm wrong but um writing the material and and having good material is probably one of the most difficult parts and promotion is probably the second most difficult part of it yeah cuz the funny thing about production is is you know sure we had a we'll call it a hiccup if you want to call losing the audio for an album a hiccup but you know the thing is you you'll find people that know how to use the equipment you know and kind of like I said if I did it again we could have recorded it um but yeah promotion was definitely difficult uh and there was a lot of guys around the comedy scene that were asking me how we got it out there and that was some of my advice I was like you know guys take it take it to where the audience is take it to where your fans are and that yeah and I I with you number number one is definitely writing the material because there's a lot of stuff when you're going through it where you're like well this is very funny to me and the longer I do this I I do find that if it's funny to me then it'll be funny to and I put this in quote my audience um but yeah it's it's it you know at first especially right now it's uh it's a little it's a little difficult because yeah not everything not everyone is your audience right now so that whole mentality of well this is funny to me let me put this up there so you do have to find kind of I don't want to say generic but you do have to kind of find the middle of the road material that you're like all right if I'm doing a show in the middle of Pennsylvania uh this joke will work and if I'm doing a this joke in a bar show in Brooklyn this joke will work you know a lot of that stuff more broadly applicable kind of stuff broadly accessible yeah exactly yeah but I enjoy it I mean the writing process is probably my favorite part cuz there's nothing better than when you get a new bit and you go and try it out and it actually works there's nothing worse when you have a new bit and you go and try it out and it's awful but there's nothing nothing better than when you just you have this idea and you're like oh man this is a good one I'm really going to tell this one about uh oh God I don't know I I'm that's the other thing is now the album's out I'm in back in the writing process trying to create new jokes and like the other day I wrote something about you know what uh what your salad dressing what kind of salad dressing you you use and what it means about you and it was just it was just the worst but yeah there's nothing better not the first time I've heard things about salad dressing like that you know what what Russian dressing says about you or what French dressing says about you versus vinegret kind of thing yeah I mean that's kind of what the whole thing was and you know it was a good writing exercise I guess if anything but I don't know it's funny it's it's it's funny to be writing again now the album's out because again it it did well but it's not like I'm going to walk into a lot of these shows of people are going to be like oh no he's telling the jokes from the album you know I'm not yeah it's not like uh it's not like it's not like when you see some of the huge comics and you're like oh man he's doing that from the Netflix special no one's saying that to me about the album so I can still tell all of those jokes I can still work on them I can even make them better than what some people actually heard them if they did listen to the album but you know it's there is this kind of thing in the back of my mind where I'm like I'm a fraud I need to do new material I got to tell new jokes tonight so I mean that that material still has legs like you say but um yeah I I think it's important to not let that material Define you that you you want to instead of trying to write something that's like that because that was successful you you have to be bold enough to write something new and different from that otherwise you sort of get trapped by trying to repeat what you did that was original before yeah I agree that is definitely something I'm going through right now um because I I do a lot of Storytelling and a lot of my jokes hinge on one another to make sense which so when I'm doing a lot of short sets when I'm doing seven to 10 minute sets it's tough to get all that in there but when I do these longer sets it works because you know I have a joke about my dad that hinges on a joke about my brother that hinges on a joke about my girlfriend and uh I living together that hinges on a joke I have about Michael Phelps you know I mean it's it's this weird through line through most of it so that's now that I'm writing again it's um it's tough to go well that's a joke about somebody being drunk and I already had a joke about somebody being drunk so I'm going to basically be doing the same impression in the same voice and the same mannerisms and yeah so I'm trying to start thinking outside of of that material because that album specifically I think was about growing up uh right now in New York being in my 20s and what that means versus when my dad was in his 20s and that whole kind of d dnamic of what what is success now what is being an adult you know do you have to do all these things do you have to check off all the check all the boxes to make sure that you're the adult now you know or can I wait till I'm 35 to be technically an adult you know that kind of thing so yeah now I'm trying to write material beyond that what's what's next and it it's definitely tough because you just want to kind of sit back and you want to do the same stuff you were already doing and tell the same goofy jokes but you do need to grow and you know it makes me respect music a lot when these guys come out with albums and they're wildly different from the last one those are the the difficult ones right it's it's so easy to get trapped into trying to emulate what you did before that was successful right and and I also understand the difference between comedy and music big thing with comedy is there's a certain brand that you're attracted to a a comic because you relate to them or you like that brand and so I don't want to go too far outside of of the Willa's brand so to speak because then someone's like wait a minute why is he doing that and you know there it's it's tough cuz you're you're you're on that balance of well I want to do something new and different and edgy but I also don't want someone to come in and go oh man he really fell off or you know I liked when he told stories and now he's doing onliners and he's really bad at that I like when he told stories and now he's doing physical comedy with watermelons yeah yeah exactly or it's yeah know it's like I okay well we'll just say it's a onean show instead of Comedy now maybe that'll make up for it not being funny anymore you know that kind of thing no let's not do that let's keep it being funny yeah I'll do my best I think for for everyone's sake I'll do my best on that one you know what would you like people to do most do you want people to go to your website do you want to go to iTunes and and have them buy the album how would you like to tell people to to to follow up on this um well where I'm at now I mean if anyone wants to buy the album I'm I'd be ecstatic for you to keep buying the album but once uh once the pre-sales end and the actual you know the it's it's out for wide release I really think that streaming is where it uh starts you start moving into focusing on the streaming specifically because gets the numbers up there and when you get on the sites like uh you know like Spotify and apple music it starts floating around you get attached the playlists and it just it it broadens uh the the amount of people that it can actually reach so you know I wouldn't check it on my website because my website is embarrassingly bad uh that is a that's a year goal is to update the website it's just you know there's good WordPress sites and then there's my website and and I honestly I don't even know if they could find it if they went to my website because it's so hard to navigate I just did not set it up well at all so yeah uh honestly if you just type my name in there's I'm the only will Ables doing comedy uh I did notice that when you type will Ables into iTunes though you find my name in my album and then you find a lot of uh gospel music and Christian rock music because I think every album in the gospel or uh Christian rock genre says willing and able at some point so if you put gospel into your show yeah then you'll pick up all those people too the whole thing unlock yeah yeah I got the Willing Ena crowd but yeah I would just stream it I mean check it out you know if if you like it you can buy it but uh you know it really helps to get those numbers up and get it get some exposure with it and get it moving around fantastic well I I really appreciate you giving us time to talk about this I I want to thank you for going into details on the audio production side especially with the hiccup it's um it's not always easy to talk about uh where there have been problems and I I appreciate you're being open about that of course yeah I mean I also like to talk about it because there sometimes you do listen to it and you're like oh I really thought it would have sounded this way but then when you hear the backstory you're like oh wow I can't believe it sounded like that so so you know I'm I'm always open to talk about it uh it's kind of like yeah but you should have heard it before yeah if you heard the first night that's actually what I said to a couple people um and I do have a few friends that listened to it when it was just on my iPhone and they even said they're like oh yeah it it's it's pretty impressive what what both your editors did and what you guys turned out but when you only hear the one time you're like okay but you know I still think it sounds great I think you've got a lot to be proud of I mean you made it to number one on iTunes with all of these troubles in place and I I yeah am looking forward to what you do next oh thank you I'll make sure uh make sure you know about it fantastic thank you so much will Ables everybody and uh we will be back next week with another episode of the Apple Insider podcast well this has been the Apple Insider podcast episode 160 I'm your host VI and joining me has been Neil internet famous nerdy guy Hughes very famous let me tell you the and humble and nerdy don't forget if you want to reach us if you want to reach us please write to newsapple insider.com please tweet at us yeah I'm at V marks Neil you're I am uh so famous that I have a verified Twitter account and I am at this is Neil well there you go we we are all in awe of that you have one too I'm still in awe of that well there you go aren't you special that means when you tweet at a celebrity they get a notification they know that you're harassing them yes we will be happy to hear from you happy to respond to you and we're also happy when you leave us positive reviews on iTunes so thank you so much for that thank you for listening we will be back with more next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 160 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I need to catch my breath wow no I am doing great how are you I'm doing all right can't complain we talk a lot about these different kinds of things and we we get into the minutia of what Apple's doing and what their profits look like and and all these things and sometimes I like to take a step back and just hear from our listeners and hear about what their experiences are and what are the things they're confronting as they use this stuff and that's the sort of thing that we would do 10 years ago or 15 years ago as Apple users because we were a much smaller group of people right and and so we would be much more focused on forming a sense of community and helping each other out but it still happens from time to time and I'm always heartened to see it so if if there's a listener out there that wants to send us email or tweet it us and tell us about the kinds of things that you're seeing and confronting or or working through as you make your buying decisions you know do you get the iPhone 10 do you get the iPhone 8 plus do you go for a homepod what are the things that you're thinking about we'd love to talk with you about those things and we'd love to be able to talk about them on the podcast now along those lines I've got a letter from a listener a little bit later on but um let's get through the news so we ran a story that says that that apple is an incredible money-making machine you published this this morning this very morning that the Apple iPhone has captured 51% of global smartphone Revenue yeah um this is the latest uh data from strategy analytics so you can never really know 100% for sure because uh there's a lot of numbers being fudged around and uh different companies report different things so they do their best sort of estimates but their latest data shows that for the first time ever uh Apple captured more than 50% of Revenue so you're looking at them holding the Lion Share of the global smartphone industry well ahead of Samsung um and it's really mostly just a two horse race at this point but uh the market is bigger than ever and apple is a bigger share than ever of that market uh they are doing extremely well and really driving the average selling price of smartphones higher with the launch of the iPhone 10 last November uh you saw Apple's average selling price spike to almost $800 um and that really is kind of a GameChanger for the industry and so you know there's a question of how much blood can you get out of the stone in terms of growth um I think Apple realized very smartly um not too long ago that uh and growth is not necessarily where they're going to find in terms of unit sales uh they can push more into the higher end of the market for people that want those kind of devices and we've talked about this many times on the podast podcast is why you see them diversifying uh their uh lineup and appealing to all kinds of broad markets um from low end to high end but consumers clearly in terms of buying iPhones gravitate toward the higher end of the market and so that's where you're seeing these higher average selling prices and that's where you're seeing that Apple's share of Revenue continues to grow and so strategy analytics put out this data this week uh declaring Apple quote an incredible money-making machine um and it's pretty hard to dispute that yeah it's interesting you know as you mentioned there are two different ways to think about growth there's there's this growth in terms of Revenue or there's growth in terms of units in people's hands right you could be Samsung and have many more phones out there in people's hands but those phones have a lower average selling price and so Samsung makes less by Revenue right and and so Apple here is raising their price and placing value on on taking even more of that money and having that customer that's willing to spend more which is not a bad customer to have interesting I I was thinking about this as you were speaking that historically years ago before we had iPhones when it was just the Mac that people always complained that the Mac was too expensive and and Mac fans talked about how uh market share didn't matter because you know yes the Mac was a very low part of market share but that they had a quality machine that they had quality service from from a quality company and that all of those things mattered more than whether or not the Mac LED PC or not and here I'm seeing that kind of flipped around where the the instead of chasing the lower cost machine like the Mac Mini or bringing down the price of the Power Mac or bringing down the price of a PowerBook kind of thing which were things that Apple did over time to make them more accessible to more people here the price is going up does that make it less accessible to to as I said you know they have a very broad product lineup and so consumers that are buying the iPhone are clearly gravitating toward the high end but you can go get a very capable A9 powered iPhone SE with you know 60 or 32 gigs of storage and a 12 megapixel camera for $350 unlocked at the store so uh consumers you know with the average selling price at $800 are are gravitating toward those higher end models but you know it's never been more affordable than right now to get into the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone and an iPad so um it's a little different there I think um you know the news just came out this week that the Mac uh at least the MacBook line um moved up for the first time ever to the number four largest notebook lineup in the world uh that's the highest that Apple's ever been ranked so I mean the Mac is doing well obviously but um it's still only 9% of Apple's Revenue if you look at the numbers um in in the stories that we ran uh this week you know the Financial Focus stuff um you're looking at uh in in the next year um they are projected that the homepod the combination of homod Apple watch and airpods will be making more money than the Mac so you see where kind of the writing is on the wall and this really upsets a lot of old school Apple Fans because Apple at the end of the day is a business and they need to make money and they need to give consumers what they want and the Mac is less and less a part of that picture now that doesn't mean it's going away the Mac is still 9% of their revenue it's a for any other company they would kill to have those kind of numbers you know um but you see why the focus is so much on the iPhone you're looking at 63% of their revenue coming from one product lineup and so that's why they continue to diversify and expand to all price ranges that they could possibly get into because there's never been a more expensive iPhone than there is right now but it's never been more affordable to get an iPhone than it is right now too and you know with the expectations the iPhone SE is going to get an update in the next few months um they're clearly going to continue that multi-pronged approach to the market and I wish that they would more with the Mac in that respect you know the Mac Mini was originally introduced as the most affordable way to get into the Apple lineup right under $500 you could get the first Mac mini um and what what have they done with that in the last you know six seven years nothing uh and it's a shame you know it would be really cool to see a Mac Mini the size of a little Apple TV uh you know with Thunderbolt 3 and uh you know the ability connect wireless keyboard mouse and get an Apple built Monitor and you know get your get your whole setup done for on the cheap have a really great desktop system that's pretty capable um you know support for egpu that sort of stuff you could do all kinds of really neat stuff yeah and you know the Mac Mini when it came out was such a breakthrough in terms of getting people on board the Mac that hadn't even considered as an option before uh the idea that all you had to do was bring your keyboard video and mouse was was kind of a big deal and it turned out that it enabled businesses that hadn't even existed before like Mac Mini Colo where you could go ahead and collocate a server on a Mac Mini it led them to introduce a Mac Mini as a server product even it was a kind of really cool thing that they hadn't even thought would happen yeah and and it it would be nice and I know that they keep saying that they're going to revisit it um but it would be nice to see them revisit in Earnest because I think that you could see that share of Revenue grow from the 9% where it's at now I mean certainly it's never going to get to iPhone levels they're never going to sell that many Macs that's just that's the end of it uh but I think if they could revisit that and sell a quality $500 machine where you kind of bring your own keyboard mouse and monitor um I think that there's a market for that just as I think that the 12-in MacBook really needs to hit that sub $1,000 price point that the MacBook Air continues to linger around at um they really need to find a way to to get to those lower price points in addition to continuing to off higher offer higher uh price points you saw that with the new Macbook Pro as well the touch bar was just too expensive and so Apple has continued to expand uh the lineup and and offer the low-end 13-inch model without the touch bar to get to those lower price points and uh you know I think that that that's in Apple's best interest uh longterm for all of its product lineups there's you know there's talk of a homepod mini so to speak uh maybe coming down the pike later this year or next year I I don't know if that's actually going to happen but you you and I have talked about it that $350 for the homod uh while a great value for what it offers in comparison to the competition is still too high for a lot of people to buy into that space especially if they want to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google that are really going on the cheap end certainly not saying that Apple should be selling a $50 model but uh I think that if they got under the $200 price point that that would do them some good $100 is an impulse purchase it is you you can walk into Target or Walmart or any one of the stories stores around and drop $100 on something and not feel too bad about it if you make it $130 that gives some people pause to think for a moment but it's still possible 150 bucks is probably where they would price such a thing yeah you look at what they did with the Apple TV you know that used to be an Impulse buy $99 and they've gotten away from that um I don't know that that's done them any favors um I think that that may may have hurt their market share as you know Roku and and Fire TV and and chomecast have uh have really taken the low end of that market I'm very happy with my Apple TV I like it a lot but you know I thought that they were smart when they kept the uh previous generation model around for $80 or whatever it was and they kind of silently 69 $69 yeah they they kind of silently discontinued it and and uh I think that's a shame um and I would like to see just as they've done with the iPhone an expansion of options if you want the $200 um high-end really great 4K Apple TV have at it um and if you want to just get in and have the Apple TV experience something simple um you just need HD um and you just need the basics Netflix and access to your iTunes library and stuff I would love to see a Sub h00 sub $100 price point for that product and and unfortunately they abandoned it and that's something I'd like to see them you know refocus on and get back to not just with the iPhone but with all their products absolutely you know that was what was great about that $69 Apple TV third generation was that it's it's obviously did Netflix and Tulu but when Amazon Prime released Prime video for Apple TV for the fourth generation it also appeared on the third generation devices and so that device serves a lot of needs if you have an Amazon Prime account you're taken care of if you have Hulu you're taking care of if you have Netflix job done uh it it really addresses a pretty wide swath of the core TV streaming audience right there you know and it's got the the outliers like crackle and some of those things it's got HBO on it so it's it's a good strong device for people who don't need to have the tvos app store right exactly and for most people they just want access to Hulu and Netflix and whatever well we'll get back to that a little bit we're going to talk about homepod more in just a moment but I wanted to mention uh so Warren Buffett has been you his Philosophy for investing he said for years is that if he would be willing to own the whole company then he's happy to own shares of it if he's not willing to own the whole company doesn't own shares of it right and he has just raised his stake in apple to uh 1653 million shares nice to be rich sorry I'm a little staggered by that um he he's dropped about 95 4.5% of their IBM hings and they they still have obviously some of those those IBM Holdings they got 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM M but uh they um no not 4.5% of their Holdings are IBM 4.5% remaining of their Holdings of IBM but yeah they have about 27.7 billion dollar worth of Apple as of trading yesterday yeah it's something um there's a lot there's a lot of uh volatility with apple lately and and the market in general obviously um there are a lot of investors who are focused on Apple as a growth stock and they obviously cannot grow forever um even though they continue to make money hand over fist so as we've talked about here many times uh Wall Street is kind of a sideshow joke when it comes to actually investing in companies for what they're worth as opposed to what the market wants so uh you know there are smarter people than me that make money on the market um I I don't invest in any specific tech stocks or anything like that um I'm just an observer uh but you know obviously Warren Buffett is uh earned his place as one of the respected guys on Wall Street um and he seems to know what he's talking about so I'm sure that makes feel in investors feel a little more confident um in times of volatility when uh he buys in so heavily to Apple yeah and you know you can see who how Apple's established their place in the market you can see who their competitors are and you can see how close or far their competitors are in terms of chasing them so knowing all those things and knowing a little bit about where Apple's trying to go in the future should tell you whether or not this is kind of an that Mak sense and for him it obviously is one that makes sense let's get to the main event let's talk homepod so the the the lead into this is before we talk about the reviews and the other things Apple watch airpods and homepod um they're predicted to rake in about 22 billion in Revenue by 2019 yeah that's what I was saying they're probably soon going to be bigger than the Mac um I I don't think that the homep Pod is going to be the biggest chunk of that the expectation is that the Apple watch will be um higher volume higher margin but the airpods are a big part of that too but homepod will contribute and the reason all those are lumped together is because Apple doesn't give specific sales figures for those devices they have historically given specific sales for the iPhone iPad Mac um but they do not give specific sales for iPods any longer uh Beats headphones airpods that sort of stuff so it's all lumped into a category called other products um and if you watch Apple's uh numbers every quarter that other products continues to grow uh and I think the biggest piece of that pie is the Apple watch and continues to do very well but certainly homepod will be a contributor going forward absolutely I mean the Apple watch is set to swallow up all of the Swiss watchmaking industry as a whole it's going to be bigger in terms of numbers than Swiss watches yeah yeah it's it's pretty impressive that they can get that many people to spend that much money on a watch um you know I would be curious to see uh what the average selling price is what models people are going for how many people are getting the the you know uh old series one model that continues to be sold um at a discount price or uh you know who's opting for the newer model with LTE that sort of stuff so um I I don't know what they're selling at um certainly they came in pretty aggressive with the high-end edition gold models you know up to $155,000 and then quickly scrapped that and went for the ceramic ones but I think they've been feeling their way around the market and seeing what's what works and what does not yeah all right this is the main event the main event is your homepod review yes tell me about it uh so I came away of of two minds about the homepod and um you know obviously when you write for an Apple website uh people are going to be very upset when you don't love everything that Apple does I'm outraged we are obviously an independent website and our duty is to our Readers first foremost but not just the most loyal Apple Fans but also people that just are curious about certain products and whether it's right for them and so I try to write my reviews with that in mind but also to be honest about you know how I feel um and how it fits into my lifestyle and so it's difficult because I don't like to make myself the centerpiece of a review I don't like to talk much about myself I'd rather just be kind of anonymous and just kind of put it out there and and give an honest assessment and be done with it I I never got into this business in an attemp to be a personality I can assure you of that um so anyhow but the problem with this product was the way that I listen to music and the way that I use speakers and AirPlay and Siri is so specific to me and the things that appeal to me about the homepod and the things that I don't care about with the homepod um weigh so much on my thoughts about the product that uh I had to really get into that personal side of what homepod is for me what I want it to be how I use it where I see it going Etc um and so this is one of the more personal reviews that I've written just because I think that that weighs so much and I and I hope that when somebody reads it you know they're not dwelling so much on on my taste in music or anything else really uh they're just focused on whether or not my take on it is applicable to them because I think some people are going to get a homep pod and absolutely hate it and some people are going to get a homep pod and just adore it and they may have very use cases than the other person that lead to that you know somebody looking for a personal assistant that's going to give them the weather and tell them jokes and stuff like that may not be as happy with the homepod as somebody who just wants a really easy to use plug-and-play quality sounding speaker so it's a it's a complicated product and in much the same way you know that the the Apple watch um recently took some time to find its footing as for what its strengths were and why you would want one um I think that there's going to be some growing pains with the homep Pod and if you know what you're getting uh and you really want a a quality speaker that's just easy and you can just put it in a room and just use it and it sounds great I think you'll be very happy with the homepod uh but if you're looking for something a little smarter a little more advanced um or even a little more technical um you're you're probably going to be lacking on this and may want to wait uh until those inevitable future software updates come and and add functionality to this which I think is just assume assumed to be in the works at this point but you know I came away of two minds about the product I love it for its design its sound its Simplicity um and I hate it for its Reliance on Siri I just absolutely find it to be a frustrating experience a lot of the time okay so I ended up giving it 3.5 out of five in the end how how are you on Apple music because it also is somewhat relied on Apple music I don't use apple music but I do use iTunes match so um I'm about as aside from an Apple music subscription and a beats one listening habit I'm about as Allin as you can get on the Apple ecosystem I buy most of my albums from iTunes when I buy digitally sometimes I'll buy from other sources like U you know band camp or something like that um or I buy a lot of vinyl and I get digital download codes and then I'll upload the digital copy to my iTunes match account so I don't have access to all music so there are certain weird things like if you say Hey you know who play some music um it'll just start playing all of your music as opposed to if you have an app music account then it starts playing your favorites or things that it thinks are your favorites I don't know why it can't do that with iTunes Match or just an iCloud music library that seems odd to me and then another thing that somebody in the comments uh said worked for them but did not work for me was I kept trying to have the homepod play the latest album by an artist so I don't know the names of albums a lot of times and I like to listen to albums from start to finish I don't want to just listen to random songs from an artist um I don't want to listen to a playlist I want to listen to an album start to finish the way that the artist intended but you know I listen to a lot of music and and I can remember artist names but I can't remember the name of an album I don't know what the name of the album is it's just kind of like I'll scroll through my music library and I'll recognize the art and go yeah that one and then play it so I found myself trying to talk to the homepod and say play the latest album by and it turns out that command just doesn't work and I don't know why um and then somebody in the comments said that they have apple music and it works fine for them so I guess if you pay Apple $10 a month and you can get better Siri function I don't know all my albums have years on them you know even then it should just default to the one that was most recently added to the library it has stamps on all these files so I can't I can't imagine why it doesn't work but to me stuff like that is so basic and so simple that it's frustrating when it doesn't work look we we know that there are a number of Siri fails we know that Siri doesn't get the right answer whether it's answers that it needs to search the web for or answers that it should just know locally based on your music collection Siri's got problems they have to address this a bunch of people in the in the comments on my review were angry and said that I should have given the product two scores one as a speaker and a music listening device and the other one as a personal assistant and these people are inevitably Apple Fans who want the product viewed in the way that is favorable to the product well no no they want the product viewed in the way that apple is pitching the product and apple is pitching the product as a fantastic Quality Music speaker first and by the way it's also got assistant and here's the problem with that logic that's wrong here's the problem with that logic you the primary way of interacting with a device is by talking to Siri so by saying that you have to rule out the smart functions of it is not fair because even if I were to ignore the fact that it can't do basic things like set two timers or really talk to my phone in a meaningful way or communicate with third party apps I still have to talk to the stupid thing to get it to play music unless I want to pull out my phone and it doesn't understand me like half the time and part of it and this is again why I got kind of personal in the review because part of it may be that I listen to a lot of lesser known and obscure artists having said that the stuff is not really that hard to to pronounce or figure out and so you know I was doing things like play the latest album by and then say it would just play all the songs by okay fine that that works but then I had the name of the album wrong on one case so I was uh looking to play an album the latest album by a band called The go team and so I was telling the hod uh play the latest album and just said okay playing all songs mine then none of them were the latest album okay fine so I'll try again so I was trying to remember the name of the album without pulling out my phone and I said uh Play Mayday by the go team and the First Choice was uh I think 18 Visions which is like a very loud hardcore band which is not nearly the same genre even close it doesn't even sound like what I was requesting mayday by the go team somehow turned into 18 Visions so so it misheard you in that case and then I asked again a second time um to play Mayday by the go team and it said uh that uh it was playing uh tame and paa as an artist um not even close again and then so I pulled out my phone and it turned out that the the problem was me I I was saying the wrong album name I was saying uh Mayday when in fact the first song on the album is called Mayday and the album name is actually semi Circle um but but here's the thing is that it should know they should have thought of the idea that you are placing the importance on the artist name and So within the priority of the artist name it should then find things that match or close as opposed to placing the priority on the first search term which was Mayday I I don't know where it got those connections I don't know you know and and the thing is it it it seems Siri seems more aggressive on the homep Pod so it used to be that it would say um she's assertive now it it would say I don't I don't know or I can't find that but now it just goes well this is probably close enough and then just throws something out there so I was trying to I would argue that that's the right answer and I'll tell you why I think that if you put this product out there in the world and you shipped it out and you gave it to reviewers and you put it in people's hands and their experience was comprised of I don't know or would you like to search the web or I can't find that or any of these these definitely not encouraging statements right that that would be the joke on Saturday Night Live that would be everyone's impression that Siri is a smart speaker who doesn't know anything right so here they've decided to shortcircuit that to prevent that from happening by simply they've asked for music We don't know what music but we're going to play something and they do it so that you don't get this Siri doesn't know anything response paried everywhere you know um like my wife came home from work last week and I just sit up the home pot it was Friday and she's like how does it work and so I put out a request and I I wanted to play a new album that I just got from a band that I saw a few weeks ago called fruit and flowers so I put in a request for that and it said okay playing LCD sound system and it's like these don't even sound alike like they're not even close I didn't and it wasn't even I didn't even ask for an album I just asked for the artist name because I only have one album by them and it just it just it's not even close like not even in the same ballpark I don't I don't know where it comes up with these conclusions uh where these artist names are are being mixed up and they really need to have some sort of a way to train it to understand um uh like I have a artist called laloo that I'm seeing this weekend and I wanted to listen to them the other day and if I spell it out and I say play artist L A LZ it goes okay playing laoo but if I say Play laoo It's doesn't understand it tries to play something else every single time it it does not understand that and it's like you you know how to pronounce it because I hear you say it back to me I know that we're pronouncing it the same way um so first of all it gave a bad demonstration for your wife yeah which not not a fantastic first impression there and second of all so my my experience in my house is if I have something set up and it fails either in the demonstration or in the first time that someone on the house besides me tries to use it that that is it no one else tries to use these things ever again yeah you get one shot is that the same thing with your wife is that is that also true in your house she hasn't really used it very much um I don't know how much of that is because she um I don't know if that's because she wasn't involved in the setup process or or what but I mean it's only been a week I imagine that you know it'll be integrated more into our life as we go um I've been using it a lot for homekit which is great but I know the specific commands that it wants for homekit and everything is easily pronounced right is another thing that I am disappointed in with homekit and Siri is that if I tell it that I want to turn if I have one smart door lock and I've named it door I should be able to say open the front door and it should also understand that that might be the same thing right having to know the exact names of the devices throughout your house is is kind of a burden and it doesn't help you the idea is that these smart assistants are supposed to be able to take the imprecise language input and handle it and by requiring specific naming like that it falls apart the funniest uh example was uh and you waited on the comments on this too because internet commenters don't get me wrong I love everybody that reads Apple Insider and I love the passion and enthusiasm that people have when they when they come to the comment section no I really do HA them no I I genuinely do and I enjoy engaging the comments but what people don't understand is sometimes when we go in and we try to clean up the comments or we try to fix it uh there are certain people that come in and just derail the discussion and it just goes down a road to talking about things that don't really matter they bring they bring in a flaming bag and leave it there in the comment section for everyone to look at and the worst part is when it's one of the first comments on the article it's the first thing everybody sees and if you come to the comments and don't comment yourself you just read them and you just see it immediately get derailed you're like oh jeez you know it's like there's no intelligent discussion being had you walk away you go elsewhere and so in my review and I wrote many words about the homepod and one sentence just to laugh about how silly Siri can be sometimes um I was trying to play a band called patio and I played the band and Siri understood and played the band but the problem was uh Siri tells you what she's about to play before it starts playing and so she goes okayy Siri play artist patio okay I'm playing patio yeah she says I've just given away a joke I'm sorry I'm playing I'm playing patio not patio patio and it's like I've never heard that pronounced that way uh somebody in the comments had to weigh in and say that that's the way that it's apparently pronounced in Spanish even though my wife speaks Spanish as her first language and said that that's not entirely accurate because it has a different number of syllables in Spanish neither here nor there uh the the fact of the matter is there should be some sort of way for Siri to learn and some sort of option for you to say okay you're saying that wrong or you're hearing me wrong or I want you to learn this phrase there needs to be some sort of programmable custom way of saying get this right I know they do it with names and stuff on your contacts on that's also inconvenient right that's also and and also fraught with problems I mean if you could say Hey Siri pronounce patio patio and it would get it and it would say okay I'm learning that now that would be fine because I have a friend whose name is AAL mhm and if you try and and tell Siri to dial a all she doesn't get it and if she does slightly understand it at all she pronounces it eel yeah well I don't want to call an eel I don't need an electric eel I want to call my friend AAL and I have tried to put it in phonetically I have tried to create a nickname I have tried to sort this thing out and um in in the end I've just given him an American sounding name that I know is his name when I want to call him which is dumb but Siri doesn't know how to pronounce it yeah and never will and and that's what's so frustrating um you know I another one I was there was a mashup album I tried to play called wugazi It's a combination of the wuang clan and fugazi and the first time it tried to play t and Paula I guess it likes to play that a lot and then the second time it tried to play songs by the artist fugazi which I understand I mean they sound very similar at that point they're just one letter off um but it it's still there should be a way for me to say no no no I want you to learn this band name so that in the future I can easily play it there's got to be some sort of a training thing added to it because everybody's going to have their own it's it's there's no way that Apple could possibly program every artist that's ever existed for everybody's obscure music libraries you know they can go in and manually make sure it understands Lady Gaga but I have I have the solution Neil yeah just as Apple gave us the You2 album yeah apple can give us Eddie Q's iTunes library oh okay and we can just happily everyone listen to the things that edq list yeah yeah great can't wait and then Siri will understand every one of them it'll be perfect it's going to be lots of Cold Play on there I'm kind of okay with that are you cold play is terrible stop it please good Lord no no thank you uh oh fine no and again I don't want this to devolve into you know artists that you listen to who has more street cred when it comes to music or whatever the simple fact of the matter is you have to use Siri to interact with this thing in a meaningful way and I have found myself using my phone to select artists to then use the homepod as an airplay speaker rather than than speaking to the homepod I find myself speaking to it more for homekit controls and not speaking to it for music controls because I don't know the name of the albums and when I try to guess the name of the album I can't get it right and even when I do know the name of the album I can't get it to work and so there's just too many points of failure at this point and so it's really disingenuous to say you should review this product with different scores for different functionality because you could say that about any of Apple's products you know the first iPhone should have been given three scores one is a internet Communicator one is a telephone and and one as a as a widescreen iPod you know like come on just because a product does multiple things doesn't mean that it should be graded on a curve on certain parts of that it's a great speaker it's a great simple speaker it sounds very good um it's not going to be the best sounding speaker you've ever heard but it's $350 for something that you can just put in your house and have it fill the room and sound fantastic so you know so here here's my concern I am kind of concerned by the that this thing was released too early and and I say that based on the Siri interaction and control part of it yeah and you know the old Apple and and I hate to say it but you know if Steve were still around no but the old Apple would have told us repeatedly that they don't release things until they're ready and well how old is Siri now old enough to know better that's the point old enough to be sent to a room at you can't really say you can't really say that they don't release it till it's ready because Siri's been around a long time and still has all these problems yeah and and that's a problem because of Apple's data collection policies and the fact that they put the consumer first and so the thing that is in many ways Apple's greatest strength and the reason that I'm willing to put a homep in my house and not an Amazon Echo is ironically the thing that holds them back because yes but I don't as a consumer I don't have to care why it's not working it's just freaking not working absolutely so I I want to move quickly to a reader review of homep we were sent an email and you you you saw this email this is from one of our listeners and I really like this guy a lot and so he starts off by saying that he's an Apple guy through and through he has been since ' 87 he is returning his homepod and he is highly disappointed which are are sharp words highly disappointed we don't take that lightly it sounds fantastic it's outstanding but the implementation is awful now he he knew it was an Apple device going into it he knew there was no way to get external audio into the device other than over AirPlay and things like that got over that uh he's got an Apple TV based living room this is fine but he's having difficulty with the way that iOS handles AirPlay if you're using an application that uses the video or the TV app the iOS device thinks that you're moving both the audio and the video to the airpod which means you get the audio coming through the speaker but a black screen with an AirPlay symbol which is not optimal at all and you know it it seems like they ought to be able to do the kind of thing that an Apple that a Google chomecast does where you can tell a chomecast to do something on the TV and it goes ahead and opens it on the TV so you ought to be able to have the audio route to the airpod and the video route to an Apple TV for example I mean it needs to tie more into the ecosystem in general you know we've talked about this before I think we talked about last week there's no reason that I can't say you know send directions to this place to my phone and then I walk out the door and then 10 minutes later I pull out my phone and I can see where I'm going you know like well and they already do that with the maps application on Mac OS if you're going ahead and and locating directions on Mac OS Maps it sends it to your pH and all this stuff is connected you know there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to say I want to watch something on TV have it dim the lights have it turn on the Apple TV the Apple TV is HDMI CEC connected so it can turn on your TV and switch it to the right input and then you know it should just be able to load the right app and and you know the TV app integrates with things like Netflix and whatever if I say I want to watch stranger things the latest episode bam pop it up hul I want to watch Hulu I want to whatever wait TV app does Netflix well it does like it does kind of a limited TV app does TV app does Hulu video HB a few it does a limited Netflix integration but even still like Netflix has to get on it does but but the fact that they have all these pieces in place they just haven't like put the puzzle together you know um and you can see where it's going and you can see where it's going to be really cool where you can do all those things and all the platforms talk to one another and it's really just um seamless you don't think about this is my Apple TV this is my homepod this is my phone whatever um all the devices talk to one another that that's where it's going we're just not there yet all right point two of of uh our listener letter it cannot be used to place phone calls it can be a speaker phone but you have to place or answer the call on your phone and then route it to the homep you and I did a speaker phone call with it last week that's literally the only time I used it and it was so insignificant to me that I didn't even mention in the review I I I just don't care okay but when we did that call um I called you from bone conducting headphones did you then have to I was using bone conducting headphones which which sounded great to my the side of my head I can't say sounded great to my ears because they were't in my ears but um you know we were confirming that the microphone wasn't amazing and did you when you answer the call have to Route it to the IP I change the audio Source just like you would you know yeah with any other exit with any other headset okay but you know if you have the airpods you don't have to do you do sometimes I mean it'll pop up and say what what audio Source do you want okay but if you can you but you can use have the airpods and place the call directly over them so the airpods are a little bit better for placing phone calls than the homepod is I mean I guess if you talk I'm just trying to clarify and make sure that we're we're agreeing with our listener letter here yeah um I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next point this this is one that that is also just one of these details right uh it works with iTunes on the Mac but he could not set it as a destination for all system audio I don't know why he couldn't I can okay so you can you uh you what you option click on the speaker at the top of set your okay right so if you have air foil as a third party thing on your your Mac you can go ahead and do that yep um and that's how I did the record player tip too now if I'm in system preferences sound and the output see regular airpl speakers I'm showing headphones I see regular air play speakers but I don't see the homod okay so you need to have air foil in order to be able to yeah I don't know why it's blocked out because I have 1 two three four five different uh AirPlay options on my Mac right now so my homepod is technically the sixth uh but I don't see that as a system output option okay I'm looking at my list I have two Apple TVs and a speaker that I was not fully aware was actually an airplace speaker to be honest I'm kind of surprised to see that there I have a I have a jam voice which is a Amazon Alexa enabled Bluetooth Wi-Fi portable speaker device and so I've always used that as as a portable Bluetooth speaker and also an Amazon Alexa device but it's showing up here in system preferences as an AirPlay device which pretty Co is totally wild to me I had no idea literally just discovered now so I I would say that three is mostly true for him because you know you expect to be able to do that out of the box and airplan speakers do that out of the box this one does not so air foil is required as a third party thing to make that work um so his his conclusion was that he felt like it was a speaker for Apple TV only and that the iOS implementation and the implementation in TV us were you know he felt the TV tvos implementation was complete and functional the iOS implementation was Half Baked and Mac OS was was not baked at all it's not as a home theater speaker anyhow so who cares if it'll connect to your Apple TV well I mean if you want really good sound out of it it's it's not a bad if you're watching TV you want distinct channels anyhow so I mean film has had stere film and television have had stereo sound for a very long time and at the base you want at least you know 2.1 sound for a good quality but you know for like for example my setup is 5.1 sound and you can go as high as like 9.2 sound now two so you know I I have a 7.2 receiver and the the honest truth is I only have 2.1 connected I have a a 7.2 receiver and I have 5.1 connected so I I was going to do the rear channels and and add a center channel to it and I was getting ready to do it and my wife just said don't bother and the truth is 2.1 Serv fine but you you do want distinct channels left and right when you're watching television um you know even a soundbar stretches the distance to have some space between them um you know I I so how is homepod at at beam forming to get some what stereo separation it's not stereo separation at all it's really just uh it's sound that fills the room but when you have something that's small you can't have true stereo sound you won't be able to do that until they allow that capability with a future software update and airpl 2 officially launches um but there was a guy uh I got to give a shout out in the comments um uh he goes by the name dick applebomb um and he uh used air foil and then created uh he has dual air foil apps playing Stereo One balanced all left the other all right used with two homepods so he's actually getting right now true stereo sound out of two homepods I thought that was really cool yeah it is um right so I am cool with this I'm not going to give away our our listener's full name because I didn't ask permission if I could talk about it but uh I I I really want to thank this listener for writing in and you know I I know you're out there and I I want to thank you again cuz this has been and we love having those different opinions and that goes again back to my review and why I like the homepod so much I mean we spent so much time here complaining about Siri but the truth is I love my homepod and the reason that I love it so much is because I love listening to music I love having good sound I love the Simplicity of it and I am potentially the world's biggest home or uh AirPlay fan I have been using AirPlay for many years um I really enjoy it and so to have uh an an expansion of the airplay lineup um and to have a new way and knowing that AirPlay 2 is coming uh I'm very excited for the future potential that my my donon receiver does AirPlay I have AirPlay speakers throughout my house but uh I quickly see my homepod becoming my go-to airplay speaker for a lot of reasons um including the fact that I assume that Siri is going to get better and I'll be able to talk to it and just it'll work and then I can use it with homekit and say you know play music in the kitchen play music in the bedroom whatever I'm excited about all that and I love I want to have a home pod in every room in my house I want to have multiple ones in one room uh it just it needs to get better it's just not it's a great product for an Enthusiast like me who is pretty much the quintessential target market for this device uh but uh it still has a lot of room to grow but thankfully with the A8 chip in it it really does have that room to grow it has the processing capability that I could see you know three years from now being a very different product than it is at launch yeah I I have to tell you I for years I pronounced the name of your receiver as Denon and and you've pronounced it as denan yeah I have no idea well I figured it out okay the the brand came from a merger of Deni ano mhm and so Den on is is the sort of correct pronunciation or Den so it's it's not denan but it's denki and ano so Den on Den on okay is where we go with that good to know well they make a great receiver that I'm praying when Apple releases AirPlay 2 is going to get updated to airpl 2 and then uh will presumably integrate with homekit and then I can tell it to uh play music in my living room and I'm very excited about that so what kind of furniture do you have your home pot on a wooden table and it does not have a ring on it okay now why would it have a ring on it the material that Apple used on the bottom where the subwoofer sound comes out uh can have a chemical reaction with some uh Furniture fin polish yeah um and uh unfortunately it leaves a ring uh there were some other articles that came out this week that showed that the Sonos one does the same thing and leaves a ring I guess it's just a standard material the same silicone material yeah it's unfortunate and if it messes up your table and and annoys your wife uh that's really unfortunate um it's an oversight by Apple I don't see this as being that big of a deal put a coaster under it I mean who cares um in other news Neil Hughes and I will be kick launching our Kickstarter for homepod coasters I I I don't think that this is a particularly big deal um but if it messed up your table uh you might be upset about that and I understand that but Apple's advice is to move it and polish it and put it on something so if you're putting it on a wood table and you're worried about it uh you know put a place mat under it you'll be all right right and the reason that they used this material is because they want to dampen vibrations they don't want the speaker to be buzzing on top of the furniture they want to be dampened and so you need to use some kind of material that will dampen vibrations and silicone is a reasonably good choice for that correct except when it leaves marks on your furniture so that's that's the question and uh you know the right answer is to clean the surface with the furniture manufacturer's recommendation recommended cleaning process and then it should be okay some of the testers that tried it so that didn't really clean it up very much and they're going to have to resand their table which is terrible I'm not going to I'm not going to before you sand a finish I would be tempted to polish a finish and not polish it with something like a you know a Johnson wax furniture polish kind of thing but to polish it with a um with a light car polish like a scratch removing car polish because that is a very light abrasive that will just take off the top surface without damaging the Finish below it and so you know you can um you can polish something up and and not have to sand it all mhm you know sanding and refinishing is annoying now where I would say to be careful with that is if you have an open grain wood then the Polish fills the Grain and you have a problem with polishing the grain you got to get out but it it's um you know use your best judgment uh govern yourselves accordingly but I would say do less rather than more and taking sandpaper to Wood means you've got to refinish the whole thing which can be kind of a pain right and and it's a shame that anybody has to do this in the first place absolutely so I can see why people would be upset or frustrated about this it does not affect me and I can't imagine it's going to affect a lot of people mine has been sitting on a wood table since day one um and I flipped it over once this came out to see if there were any stains there are not all is good yeah now Consumer Reports also gave their review of homepod they did it's a fact they did and they have a history of giving glowing reviews to Apple products they don't they I mean they they they have loved no I'm sorry got to take that back they they haven't loved they used their web page to get a lot of attention over the iPhone 4 and aate they have talked at length about the 2016 MacBook Pro where they used a test for battery performance that that made them withdraw the recommendation for the laptop and they also uh did dramatic testing for the iPhone 10 and found all sorts of unique ways to damage it as a part of their review and they went ahead and they wrote up and issued their Consumer Reports homepod review very quickly after they got the units same day and and they gave glowing reviews to the home Max and the Sonos one they said that the homepod sounded worse than the other two and that flew in contrast to basically every impression that was on the internet and here's the thing Consumer Reports is certainly entitled to their opinion I have no problem with them saying that the Google home Max is a better speaker um but you have to take it all in context uh they published their Impressions declaring quite definitively in a headline that the home Max sounds better than the homepod and the Sonos one sounds better than the homepod after a day of testing it okay um but again back in 2010 they were the instigators of the so-called antenna gate controversy with the iPhone 4 a couple years ago when the MacBook Pro came out they declared that it had poor battery life only 4 hours and it turned out that they had a developer setting enabled in Safari that was ruining the battery life that they went out of their way to flip on um and then like you said the iPhone 10 tumble test they simulated falling down like 50 flights of stairs or something and it's like what like nobody's phone is going through this kind of situation anyhow they have a history of kind of stirring the pot when it comes to Apple products and they also ially will wait you know a month or two after testing something to issue a definitive statement and this time they did something the day of and so all those factors combined led to uh Mike worthley uh who's an editor with apple Insider writing an editorial and I don't want to speak too much on his behalf because it's his editorial but um just to summarize his point uh you know Consumer Reports is a history of uh riling up Apple Fans um people that are following closely that are into Apple products don't necessarily take Consumer Reports too seriously because of uh the antenna gate and everything else that they've done over the years and on top of that uh they usually wait a while and do extensive testing before coming up with a definitive conclusion but this time they on the same day ranked the Google home Max as inferior or as superior to the homod so all that led Mike to write an editorial just pointing out all these facts and saying you know you know what's going on here I want to point out so they also ranked Sonos one as Superior to homepod right John McFarland who is the found of Sonos he he's retired from his CEO role now but but he did that in in last spring mhm he found that one Sonos one against one homepod the homepod was Superior so when the founder of Sonos tells you that the homepod is the better product one for one well it costs $150 more so I mean no no but I mean the the the qual there's something to be said for this right yeah so we when after Mike published this after we published this M Consumer Reports responded on Twitter no they they issued a press release go D tell I'm rubbing my hands together listeners yeah Consumer Reports issued a press release uh disagreeing with Mike's editorial saying that uh uh that they were disappointed um and accusing um Apple Insider and and Mike specifically of not giving them an opportunity to comment before it ran the editorial now uh Mike that's also not true Mike Works directly for me and he took me through the process process he went to their website they have a form there where they say all press inquiries should go through he filled out the form he put a return email address of news at Apple insider.com which is how you reach us uh and did not get a response uh for about 12 hours before we hit the publish button on that on that editorial so um I commented just uh uh responded back to Consumer Reports and just said uh you know our editor Mike worthley did actually request comment before this editorial went live um and uh there is a very clear proven public uh number of examples of of consumer reports making controversial decisions when it comes to Apple products whether or not you disagree with them uh it's not up for debate that they have upset apple and upset Apple Fans many times over the years through what people viewed as unfair assessment of their products um but having said all of that uh I welcome the opportunity to talk to consumer reports more they've certainly never given us comment in the past but they felt compelled to write an a press release about us so you know um I would like to go to their Labs can we go to their Labs I would love to I I would love to work with uh Consumer Reports I'd love to find out what they do because again I don't care about their assessment of the homepod that doesn't it doesn't matter to me if they don't like the homepod uh the problem is to a lot of people it looks like they have an agenda it looks like you know maybe uh maybe complaining about Apple products puts more eyeballs on on their stuff I don't know I don't I don't know what it is but uh you know where there's smoke there's fire there have been a few instances of these kind of things going on and it's not new and it's happened a few times and uh I'm not trying to question The credibility of them there or anything like that but it was odd that they published the same day uh that the speaker came out with a definitive conclusion which is not the consumer reports style usually they take a while to do it I don't know why they did it that way and we asked them why and they didn't really give us a clear answer so um despite the hu and cry and and the press release being issued and everything else we don't really have a clear explanation as to why they even told us they're working on a formal review that's forthcoming but in their you know first hot take on it the day of uh They said that the gum home Max sounds better and the Sonos one sounds better even though basically no reviews came to that conclusion they're the only ones that hold that conclusion so uh a little bit of controversy this week uh it was interesting um and I think uh hopefully cooler heads prevail in the end I'm not looking to pick a fight with Consumer Reports believe me um but you know I I just think that I think that uh uh I think that they deserve to be called out and questioned for the way that they handled that one now you said earlier that you have unique ways of using your homepod that you listen to music in unique ways I've been experimenting with it seeing what I can do with it so so how are you getting vinyl to homepod so to take a step back people keep complaining about homepod and how limited it is and how limited the access who it is and if you don't have an iPhone you can't use it well that's not entirely true or apple music if you don't have apple music you can't use homod again I don't have apple music not just I'm just repeating the words I know yeah um what people who are saying that don't realize and as somebody who has used AirPlay for a long time back when it was known as air Tunes um AirPlay has been around for a long time and it's been reverse engineer and hacked to death to the point now where there's a whole ecosystem of uh products and and applications and devices that tap into AirPlay in very interesting ways um and it's a very robust ecosystem if you know where to look to really get a great whole home speaker experience and even cheaper than you could with competing services like Sonos um so I'm a big airplane Enthusiast and I have a whole homeful of AirPlay stuff and I've done stuff like this in the past just kind of as a proof of concept because like you and like of our readers I'm guessing I'm just a nerdy guy who likes to go oh I wonder if I could do this I you know it's I wonder if I could do this and then you try it and lo and behold it works and you get a sense of accomplishment out of that so anyhow I have a uh cheap little record player that was given to me as a gift uh it's a Sylvania record player um it costs like $40 on Amazon it's not particularly great sounding or high quality record player but it offers a lot of unique features it has a built-in speaker so um you could just uh bring it with you and have batteries in it and just play music if you really want to bring your records with you out on the go or something um it has auxiliary out so you can plug it into other devices or speakers or whatever but it also has USB out and it also connects to a Mac with drivers and you can use it as audio line in so if you connect the USB port on the Sylvania player to your Mac you can then do whatever you want with that audio so one of the uses that would be obvious would be to have something that was only released on vinyl and you don't have a digital copy of it you want to convert it you could then play the record record it and have a digital copy of it one of the things you can do if you get a little clever is use an app like air foil which we mentioned before which is a third party app from a great developer called rogba yeah that's Paul cass's U company they've been around for a long time and they make a lot of great products but some of the great things that they do are AirPlay related so they I met I met them back at macor in the old days actually oh nice I they were I was tweeting with them uh uh a few days ago they were Thanking us for writing articles about them and they do great stuff this is not they're not paying me or anything like that I just really think they do a great job we again about audio hijack and their loop back applications but like Paul is a great guy yeah and uh they have a whole Suite of AirPlay application so you can turn um any device that you have into an AirPlay receiver you can turn your iPhone into an AirPlay receiver so start music on one device or take an old iPod touch or an old iPhone and have it plugged into something and it would receive music and you could use it as an AirPlay receiver and plug speakers into it or whatever you can do all kinds of crazy stuff cool stuff like that it works on Windows it works on Mac and you can get the the main air foil and Linux and you can get the main air foil app for your Mac and then you can use any device and if you wanted you know a midi controller for an instrument or whatever and then use that line in capability with air foil to beam any audio to your homepod so just as a proof of concept uh I did it now you I mean obviously there's some limitations there's some lag there's this there's that um but it's cool um I connected my record player to my Mac and then I used air foil to beam it to my homepod and there I was listening to a record player on my homepod so for all the naysayers out there who say that the homep Pod is limited and you can't connect to things and you can't do things with it I say that's hogwash I say if you want to get a little clever with it and it doesn't really take much time or effort or money um you can do some really cool things and listen to basically whatever music you would want on your homepod uh there are AirPlay hacks on Android and if you wanted to use an Android device to stream music to it you could uh homepod works very well with AirPlay and AirPlay has been hacked to bits and uh un unpacked and and repurposed in all kinds of cool ways and it's a lot more connected than you realize awesome well next up we have a very special thing we have an interview with the number one Comedy album on iTunes we have the comedian himself coming on the show and that's going to be very special so I'd like to welcome a very special guest to this segment of the Apple Insider podcast joining us now is Will Ables and will is the the holder of the title for having a number one comedy album on iTunes yep and hi welcome that's that's got to be really cool seeing yourself in iTunes and seeing yourself alongside other people that that you know you you might never think to be in the company of oh yeah that was definitely the uh the coolest part I mean the original goal was like all right let's see if we can break the top 10 um because just the names that were surrounding me were so they're you know your idols and people that you one day hope to become I mean it was uh like Adam Sandler was on there John malany Jim Gaffigan so I was like looking at those names and I was like all right well maybe maybe the top 10 and then when it debuted number one uh I just couldn't believe it it was it was just surreal but let's let's back up a little bit because you know you said maybe the goal is to to break the top 10 but before that how did you get from performing to the goal of making an album yeah uh so the way it all kind of came together was uh I run a show in New York uh it's a monthly standup show called hey guys and we were celebrating the one-year anniversary of it and so we put together this kind of Allstar showcase and then I was going to do a new half hour at the end of it and a friend of mine who's a musician and a producer just on a whim was like oh I'd like to record it you know I want to practice recording and so I said all right I could you know if it comes out well enough maybe we can release it as like a half hour album and the show went well uh the recording was great but I just didn't quite have the set that I wanted so we booked the whole thing again we uh focused only on the album this time so that was nice so we separated ourselves from the show from hey guys and it was just the will Ables album recording and I booked a couple different Comics keeping in mind that I needed the energy to be high and I also didn't need them to steal the show so I I had to specify uh who who we booked based on that and we brought all the equipment back and I ended up you know recording 40 minutes uh got a great crowd in and yeah and then that was kind of the last easy thing to happen with the rest of the album release I I'm I'm sort of hesitant I kind of think I know where you're going with that but um you know longtime listeners of of this program know that from time to time we've had issues with recording equipment and audio production quality and and things that we've had to learn how to overcome so I'm I'm sort of I I got a I'm hesitant and at the same time I have to ask what happened next yeah so then now we're coming off of the the recording and just for um just so I could hear it before uh my producer before my co-producer sent me the uh the first recording I just happen to record it on my phone because I pretty much tape every set on my phone on my iPhone and I listened to it I was like oh this is great this sounds great I can't wait to hear what it sounds like with actual professional equipment and uh two days later I got a an email from from him and he was like Hey you're not going to believe this uh I wasn't uh so he he had a lot I don't want to throw him under the bus because it's not entirely his fault he had a lot of hats on yeah the thing to REM remember is that something always goes wrong and it's not exactly necessarily anyone's fault like there's nothing intentional but equipment fails or there's a human error or or whatever but there's there's a frequently a problem right yeah and so what happened is he he emails me and says hey so we lost all the audio um I was he was also filming it and he was like while I was filming I didn't notice that the audio that uh was connected to your microphone specifically turned off about halfway through the opener so we lost all of the audio for an album recording and you know I think in any other scenario or any other comic on the planet would have said well we have to record this again but I'm a fairly unknown comedian especially in the New York scene so I didn't think we could fill the room again for a third time that was kind of our big our big hurdle and I was like well let's just see what we can do with the audio from the cameras because we had two or three cameras running and so we took the audio off of that and that's the majority of the album and then because I happen to record it on my phone that was what we ended up using as the uh the constant through through the through the whole editing process so yeah we ended up using my iPhone recording and Camera recording the audio from the cameras and and you you sent me some notes from your co-producer and and they say you know we used a otu a mark of the Unicorn 8 pre- audio interface which is a fantastic interface two AK G c214 mics to capture the room sound and the board mix that had the microphone mhm running it all into Protools 12 you know you're you're using really top quality gear right the the the the equipment is not the problem you've got fantastic equipment you've got fantastic mics you've got a fantastic interface you've got all the things that you should have in place yeah and and the first time we recorded it with that exact same equipment the audio was fantastic it sounded incredible I I I was I mean listening to it with him I was like this this is so professional I mean I I feel like beyond my years in comedy just listening to this so it was so much more disappointing the second time around when he was like yeah I guess my computer turned off or I actually don't know what caused it to just turn off like that but yeah so that's that's ended up that's that's what ended up happening so there you have it you Ed the iPhone audio for your iTunes Al yeah yeah it actually sounded uh better than I expected better than I expected for sure and you know the iPhone itself is a fine recorder the the thing that it needs to have is a good mic and a good mic interface in front of it to really make it work well and uh you know I think I'm we can talk more about that offline but I want to give you some tips and see things that you could do just to have that always in your back pocket yeah no that'd be great um so the cameras you're using were the Canon 5D yeah you're pulling audio off of those wow yeah and the one thing with the with the 5D is that it and I'm sure you can adjust the settings but um we weren't really working with professional uh cameramen so we uh it turns off every 12 minutes it stops recording every 12 minutes or so so that was actually why we were lucky to have recorded it on my iPhone because the iPhone was a straight through 40 minute recording whereas the cameras it cuts off about every 12 minutes so we needed the iPhone to fill in that that kind of second that we were missing between each one so you used the camera audio and then filled in with the iPhone audio yeah yeah that sounds like a complex edit yeah I mean it he put it together in just in one sitting um because we kind of we also took it and just had to kind of say all right well we'll brand it as a live album because was at that point there's no way we can use the other recording from the first run because the audio was so vastly different um and you know he just he kind of raised the levels and he couldn't really get rid of uh too much of the like the the the room noises uh that was a whole another thing was that room was so much noisier than I had anticipated Just Between the buzzing of the lights the bar upstairs their Keg Room was downstairs so you can hear the co CO2 two popping uh at one point the show after us came in while I was finishing up and there they had a bag of balloons and the balloons hit one of the cameras so you have the sound of a balloon hitting a camera and those are the kind of things that he couldn't quite eliminate um so that was uh that was probably the next hurdle was okay it's a live album but it also sounds kind of crazy yeah and he did a lot of the cleanup for that in uh isotope rx6 yeah yeah using the fre weeks trial of it mhm and we we have a license for rx6 and use it here a lot it's really helpful for taking out Reverb and editing out single noises that occur and things like that you know I I take out sirens and stuff like that from time to time on Neil's audio Yeah and uh I think it's really impressive that you're able to use the the onewe trial of that to uh clean this up a lot yeah and I think that was one of the things I don't think um my first editor being my co-producer I don't know if he entirely knew how to use it because he was just using the trial so it was one of his first times using it uh and I think if he had a little more experience with it we could have definitely utilized it better but for what he did do with it it already sounded you know 100% better than what it did when we first started yeah the way that they do that product is they give a bunch of plugins that learn the audio process the audio and you you can use the defaults reasonably well and get pretty far just by clicking through you know three default presets and have it deliver the audio and that's okay that goes a long way and and honestly 90% of the time that's what I'm doing too uh but they make a uh a website for it called the RX cookbook and you can search the RX cookbook for specific examples of problems like the siren or a cat meow or a door Clos or or you know these kinds of noises and they tell you what to do to the presets to take care of those things and quickly teach you the product for the specific problem you're trying to solve for yeah I mean and that's that's great yeah it's a very cool thing so so you you lost all the audio you pieced it back together out of out of recording using the iPhones mic which is really quite incredible what are some of the things that you learn from this what what are some of the things that you do next time differently uh well I would definitely plan on recording it more than two times uh that was the biggest thing I took out of it uh was just because that's one of the challenges of um running longer comedy sets in New York is uh it's there's not a lot of opportunities to run more than 10 minutes so when I ran the half hour the first time that was pretty much the first time I'd run that half hour uh at least a new half hour so you know I wasn't really thinking ahead too much cuz again we weren't really planning on making this into an album so that was kind of the the problem but you know I would definitely have prepared myself uh a little bit more to have a couple of runs set up and recorded it maybe three or four times that's definitely something I would have done the comics I booked I would that's something I wouldn't change I definitely book them again and I think another thing would be just I felt a lot of pressure and it was all self-driven but I felt a lot of pressure to get the album out as quickly as possible possible and knowing what I what I know now I would definitely have just been a little more patient because the next step was going through the the publisher and I chose to use CD Baby and they're very hands-off uh and so that was a good learning experience for me but I definitely missed a few things you know cuz I felt like I was rushing through it and I was self-producing this album now through them for the first time ever so I probably if I could go back I definitely would have been a lot more patient and maybe ask a little more advice on how to go through the publishing process besides the the overcoming the recording fault and things like that what are the other reasons that you would book two shows for book three dates for why why would you record more than a couple of time more than once if you knew that you had the equipment all locked down um just you know some jokes just hit differently with different audiences and so by recording two or three times uh you have a chance to instead of having okay I know five out of these 12 jokes are this is the a material these are always going to hit these are always going to be big laughs you have a chance to get an audience in there that for a lack of a better word call it the B material the B material hits like a material and so then if you have two or three runs of it and you're lucky enough that every joke hit at least one time through that whole recording uh then you can start piecing it together and it sounds like every single joke was the biggest laugh you'd ever heard and that being said we had a great audience on both of them and spe specifically the second show every joke hit really well but I was also performing mostly in front of friends so that was another thing was it'd be nice to get a fresh audience in who maybe hadn't heard me before uh because some of the jokes I know specifically my roommate and my girlfriend were in the audience and they know these jokes better than anybody you know so it's um tough to to force a laugh when know the punch line I guess but that was one reason I would definitely uh try and record again just to try and piece together that that perfect every joke hit set so how how hard is it to get people to come to these kinds of things uh well New York specifically it's difficult because there are 8 million shows I mean there's you could go see seven shows a night if you wanted to and you probably would have missed some I mean that's that's what makes it really hard to fill seats because it's difficult to make uh the show stand out and you can book Comics that have been on Comedy Central that have you know maybe not necessarily been on Netflix because those guys are probably selling out Arenas and giant theaters on their own but you can have TV credited comics and because you're in New York no one no one cares everyone kind of takes it for granted they're like yeah I I just saw a TV credited comic at dinner tonight you know he's my friend that that kind of thing so no one's really impressed so that makes it really difficult and just yeah just the promotion aspect of it it's hard to rise above you know sure someone could go see my album recording but they could also go see Hamilton and that's that's really what makes it difficult to get butts and seats is most shows don't stand out when you're looking at the broad spectrum of what do I want to do tonight right it's hard to get your show uh recognized now you said one of the things that you wouldn't change were the people that you'd booked to to open for you yeah they uh they were fantastic so I booked uh she she's starting to she's starting to blow up a little bit her name's Caitlyn PFO I I booked her to host because she's super high energy uh very very funny and she's very kind she has a great uh point of view and just she has this this energy that just really can't be matched I mean I've never seen someone perform the way she does and she knows how to work a room so she can gauge the audience she can figure out okay where do where where where is this going wrong like what's going right and she can read them and she can see what they like and she'll Hammer at home and then the second comic was a guy named Joe Pera and Joe's a pretty big comic and he's got a really uh devout following and very unique guy he's got a lot of stuff on Adult Swim and I booked Joe because Joe is one of the funniest Comics I've ever seen but he has a very low energy uh so between him and and Caitlyn there was this kind of wave of energy and and laughter that I sort of preemptively calculated thinking okay Caitlyn's gonna come in she's gonna be big she's goingon to be loud she's going to be very funny and they're going to laugh really hard and then you have Joe who's going to keep riding that wave they're going to keep enjoying themselves a lot of my friends were there just to see Joe because he he's just that funny which is funny that you know that was that was another thing is when I booked it a second time I had to give my friends that went the first time an incentive to come so I booked Joe perah because just a lot of people love him and so I knew that yeah he would go second he would not be super high energy he wouldn't suck the energy out of the room but he would keep the laughs going he would keep them in it and people would really enjoy it and then Caitlyn had another minute or two to get the energy back up if she needed to and then I can kind of ride the momentum of the wave going back up and then I just go into my set and it worked perfectly I mean that actually worked which was nice to see that that wasn't some crazy Theory I had uh and they were just they were fantastic um you know and Joe had to Joe had to also kill a little time on his own and ended up singing Hang on Sloopy which was just if if you're a fan of Joe Pera just seeing him off the cuff start singing Hang on Sloopy was just the best part of the night so so why did that happen so again my producer is a music based and in comedy you know the way we kind of check each other make sure you know where you're at during the set so if you have a 10-minute set somebody gives you the light as we say at 9 Minutes usually and usually what that is it's just someone turns their cell phone on and they wave their cell phone at you so you know that you have one minute left and like in the old days waving a flashlight at you or something so that You' know that's your time yeah but yeah basically the the flashlight has been replaced with a a cell foam and again because was wearing so many hats between filming and recording and he was also teching the show when he held his phone up uh the light wasn't on and I obviously wasn't paying attention because I'm about to do 40 minutes of standup so my my my brain was elsewhere yeah you're preparing yeah and I did think at one point man Joe's um Joe's been up there for a while and finally Joe himself was like hey um how much time like how much more time do you want me to do and that's when Caitlyn was like I don't think the lights on I looked up and I see see my producer just shaking his phone and that's like oh so Joe has been up there for about 15 minutes but you know you wouldn't have known it until he asked and I'm glad he did and and that's what happened so the positive part was we got him to sing Hang on Sloopy out of it and everyone kind of got back into it and yeah that that was how it all went yeah nothing is easy in performing right there's always going to be something that happens no I mean we could have had a hundred people working on this and I'm I'm sure something else would have found its way in absolutely yeah from from there you you said you took it to CD Baby so what what happened going through CD baby cu you said that that was kind of hands off and you had to sort of um you know stumble through that yeah so um well actually one one thing I actually I forgot I kind of skipped over this um before I went to CD Baby we actually did have a second editor come in uh and that was when cuz we were talking about the RX isotope and he actually was a professional audio engineer so he also used that and then we ended up being able to clean up some of the things uh in the recording itself so I accidentally skipped over that yeah so I was about to go into CD Baby I was all excited we just gotten the copy back and then my girlfriend got home from work and she was like I was just talking to my friend and I don't know why you don't ask her boyfriend to do it who I knew and so he actually did get a hold of it and he spent 3 weeks on it cleaning it up um even more than it already was so he actually was the one that was able to get out the like air conditioning the room noise the you know the beer cans opening and all that and then when he got it back to me that was when we went into into CD Baby and so during the time he was uh editing I went through I asked a couple of other Comics that had released albums uh to see who they went through in terms of publishing and it kind of came down to tune core and and CD Baby and they're both great publishing uh websites but what it came down to was money and uh ton Corp takes a little more out of it and they have a yearly charge that they make and in my head I was like well I'm not going to make that much money off this so if I'm going to be charged yearly I'm going to end up losing a lot of money uh so I went through CD baby but that was the difference was there a lot more hands off um and so it comedy is interesting because it becomes a bit confusing cuz you're like well is this just comedy like is there a comedy section that I can edit this in or is or I can publish this through and it's you know a spoken word so then you start getting mixed in with the spoken word Group which could be yoga it could be poems you know so that was that was also hard to navigate and branding it live also took it to another level I mean it it was it was a lot of stuff that really I just really didn't understand while I was going through it as you can kind of tell by the way I'm wording this so how how about the promotion of it you've gotten it published you've gotten CD Baby figured out how do you promote it because it's it's one thing to go ahead and publish something but if if no one buys it you've just got a nice vanity project right right well and that was the part that I uh I'm probably the most proud of out of all of it was was the actual promotion because that was another another part where we or where I I made a plan and stuck to that plan and it actually worked out and so one thing I I started thinking about was okay how like how does this make a dent uh how does this you know get any recognition and I started thinking about who would want to listen to this and who would on top of that buy it and what I really kind of you know had this eye openening moment was well you know it was produced by myself and by friends the audience was the majority of them were my friends you know uh the people that were Ed it they were all my friends and I was like oh my friends my friends and family they're my fans at this point uh and so I went back to Maryland and I decided to consolidate so the first thing I did was I was like all right I'm I'm only going to promote it through iTunes um because just personally I felt that uh making a dent on iTunes meant more than than Amazon because iTunes is music you know it is it is comedy it is all these things you buy albums you listen to albums through iTunes whereas Amazon is everything on the entire planet and so I wanted to focus everything to be on iTunes and also just breaking into their top 10 was just would be a really cool thing to do and so I first Consolidated to that and then I went back to Maryland and I decided to really push home put sorry to really uh hammer at home and lucky I'm lucky enough that one of my friends from high school is now a news anchor on the local four state Channel and I got a hold of him and he sent me one of their their journalists and we put together this really really cool promotional piece for the uh for the album And She interviewed me and we did that all back home in my hometown and it was great I mean it got the word out to people that I that probably wouldn't have heard about it otherwise you know because unless you're my friend on Facebook or you follow like some very small blogs that were willing to help me out it's pretty hard to get it out there you know it's hard to it's hard to promote this outside of your bubble so I just decided to stay in my bubble and and hope that there were a couple people that just that hadn't really thought of me or I hadn't thought of them that were like oh okay yeah I'll check this out and it worked I mean and it ended up working it was it was cool I would get messages from people that I hadn't seen or even people from my hometown that I never even met that just were like hey this is so cool to see a HomeTown guy doing and that was kind of the goal was to reach out to them so it was great that we had this plan or I had this plan it actually came through and yeah and then the day of when it actually was released at number one that was that was the biggest shocker was just oh my God I made a plan and the plan worked you know after all the things we had to kind of stumble through with the audio and trying to figure out CD baby and all these things the one thing that really worked was the thing that mattered the most and that was the the promotion yeah yeah it was great describe for me the moment when you found out that it was number one oh this was a such a such such a moment to remember so the original date we wanted to release it was in November and like I said that was when we we I handed it off to a second editor and he had it then so I was like well I'm not going to rush through this and and so then I decided Well the album's called regrets of my father so the probably biggest regret my father's ever had was the day I was born wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute okay can I I know it's on the album can you give us a little bit of a teaser about that story you don't have to do the whole bit but just give us something to help us understand what that means oh well I mean you know it's purely uh purely a joke but uh you know if you look at my four siblings and I I'm the oldest of four and and you know my my brother who's right below me in terms of age he's a a scientist and my sister's going to be a teacher and well just looking back my priorities were never uh I guess what what my dad would have preferred I mean my dad was a big baseball guy he's a finance guy and I spent a lot of my time uh focusing on let's say the Arts I guess and uh I I guess the the biggest moment I think my dad had when he was like there's something up with this kid is I uh well I rewrote my own version of the hit play hit Broadway play cats and I think that was moment my dad was like all right so he'll probably play baseball for a couple years but um I think his uh his priorities are going to be elsewhere yeah and so that was kind of the and I just I just thought that out when we first when I first first made up this uh album title I just thought it was too funny um because my dad's always been very supportive and that is something that that comes around on the album as I talk about him trying to figure out how to raise me as a kid versus you know how supportive he actually was at the very end of it all uh but it just it just thought it was such a good album title for uh for a comic specifically you know and I think a lot of the lot of the guys and girls that do this can relate to it um but yeah and so then I decided to release the album on my uh on my birthday and there was a little there was a little bit of it too it was like well is either going to be a day a birthday to remember or a birthday that I'm very much going to want to forget and so it's the 20th it's December 20th and that was when all of a sudden you know I was very confident about everything I was confident that it sounded good I was confident about the promotions and I thought yeah we're going to break the top 10 and in the back of my mind I really wanted to be number one I was like I want to be the number one comedy album that's the goal but you know you don't you I was like my second goal is top 10 but I really want to be number one and then all of a sudden the day of you know it's going to be released at midnight and I just got that feeling in your stomach and I was like looking at the other guys in the top 10 and like I said it's guys like Jim Gaffigan and John Main and Adam Sandler and I was like how am I going to beat these guys you know and that just kind of kept growing and then I had a show that night as well and the show wasn't very good and I was like uh this is this is kind of weird I don't know I don't know and I was and there's a a comedy show around the corner from my from my apartment and I was going to go there so I could celebrate with other Comics at midnight and then all of a sudden I thought no because if this doesn't even break the top 10 what am I going to do I'm just going to be stuck there with everybody and so one of my friends came over my uh my girlfriend was here and my roommate was here and we're all sitting around waiting toward till midnight and my girlfriend has really long hours so she had to go to bed and my roommate he has long hour so he ended up going to bed and my friend had gotten off work and they had a long day so they had fallen asleep on the couch so so yeah so I'm sitting here you know we're watching a couple of Netflix specials or we is I at this point so I'm watching Rory scov cuz it was my favorite special of last year and it's like 11:58 I'm mentally preparing myself to not be in the top 10 but then to try and still enjoy my birthday and midnight hits I go to iTunes and I see my album cover is the Insignia 4 comedy albums on iTunes and I was like is that just because this is my iTunes or is that a good thing and so I click on it and I see the charts and I see that I'm number one and I just yell out oh my God I'm number one my my friend on the couch wakes up for a second and just was like oh happy birthday and I was like no you don't understand man wake up I was like the album's number one yeah so I run into my bedroom and I wake up my girlfriend and I was like hey the album's number one and she like yeah can I go back to sleep she's like oh happy birthday yeah so she wishes me a happy birthday I was like no I care about my birthday yeah and so she fall was asleep finally I calm myself down and I realized everyone in my apartment's asleep and I want to celebrate so I went into my Atrium I went out into the hallway which connects to all the other apartments in the building and I put my headphones on I brought my computer out and I ended up just you know tweet tweeting about it and Instagram putting stuff on Instagram and putting stuff on Facebook and just having a beer to myself sitting next to a pile of shoes and so you know you have this idea that you're going to be celebrating there's going to be champagne everywhere you know there's going to be great music playing and you're just going to be raging and instead you're sitting outside next to a pile of shoes drinking a beer watching Netflix on your computer but uh definitely will never forget it and it was just this feeling where I just I didn't know how I was going to sleep I was so excited and I couldn't wait to wake up the next day and then properly celebrate it with everybody when they were awake but yeah it was really it was really cool and it uh you know it stayed at number one for the full day uh I kept checking cuz I was like a there's no way it's going to stay there and it stayed there for 24 hours the next day it uh went between 2 and three which is also very cool just to stay there and then stayed in the top 10 for a couple of days and then and then it uh very quickly moved moved out of the top 10 and out of the charts entirely but uh it did a lot better I mean just staying in the top 10 for a couple days was also uh exciting because I didn't know how long it would stay in there and then to go from number one and then stay in there that was yeah it was all just unreal yeah I can kind of Imagine going and refreshing and just you know I gotta go check right yeah I'll be right back I gotta go check iTunes yeah and then uh you know being on my phone all day checking it on on my phone all day uh taking about 10,000 screenshots to make sure it was actually happening you know and sending it to people I me like this is this is real right this is number one right can you just do me a favor and go to iTunes and check for me yeah yeah yeah just make sure it's not mine I want to make sure it's not my computer it's actually on everyone else's although if we could do that that would be a really fun practical joke oh that be horrible be terrible uh yeah would would be funny really demoralizing wouldn't it yeah it' be funny years later like years later I'd be like a that's a pretty good prank but uh it would probably take couple couple of sessions in therapy and uh yeah a couple years to distance myself before I'd really find a humor in it good way to make enemies though yeah it's a great way probably the best way this has been a lot of fun for me I've really enjoyed having you talk to me about this um I I really think that uh promotion is probably one of the most difficult Parts you know the the production and things well I say that and I'm wrong but um writing the material and and having good material is probably one of the most difficult parts and promotion is probably the second most difficult part of it yeah cuz the funny thing about production is is you know sure we had a we'll call it a hiccup if you want to call losing the audio for an album a hiccup but you know the thing is you you'll find people that know how to use the equipment you know and kind of like I said if I did it again we could have recorded it um but yeah promotion was definitely difficult uh and there was a lot of guys around the comedy scene that were asking me how we got it out there and that was some of my advice I was like you know guys take it take it to where the audience is take it to where your fans are and that yeah and I I with you number number one is definitely writing the material because there's a lot of stuff when you're going through it where you're like well this is very funny to me and the longer I do this I I do find that if it's funny to me then it'll be funny to and I put this in quote my audience um but yeah it's it's it you know at first especially right now it's uh it's a little it's a little difficult because yeah not everything not everyone is your audience right now so that whole mentality of well this is funny to me let me put this up there so you do have to find kind of I don't want to say generic but you do have to kind of find the middle of the road material that you're like all right if I'm doing a show in the middle of Pennsylvania uh this joke will work and if I'm doing a this joke in a bar show in Brooklyn this joke will work you know a lot of that stuff more broadly applicable kind of stuff broadly accessible yeah exactly yeah but I enjoy it I mean the writing process is probably my favorite part cuz there's nothing better than when you get a new bit and you go and try it out and it actually works there's nothing worse when you have a new bit and you go and try it out and it's awful but there's nothing nothing better than when you just you have this idea and you're like oh man this is a good one I'm really going to tell this one about uh oh God I don't know I I'm that's the other thing is now the album's out I'm in back in the writing process trying to create new jokes and like the other day I wrote something about you know what uh what your salad dressing what kind of salad dressing you you use and what it means about you and it was just it was just the worst but yeah there's nothing better not the first time I've heard things about salad dressing like that you know what what Russian dressing says about you or what French dressing says about you versus vinegret kind of thing yeah I mean that's kind of what the whole thing was and you know it was a good writing exercise I guess if anything but I don't know it's funny it's it's it's funny to be writing again now the album's out because again it it did well but it's not like I'm going to walk into a lot of these shows of people are going to be like oh no he's telling the jokes from the album you know I'm not yeah it's not like uh it's not like it's not like when you see some of the huge comics and you're like oh man he's doing that from the Netflix special no one's saying that to me about the album so I can still tell all of those jokes I can still work on them I can even make them better than what some people actually heard them if they did listen to the album but you know it's there is this kind of thing in the back of my mind where I'm like I'm a fraud I need to do new material I got to tell new jokes tonight so I mean that that material still has legs like you say but um yeah I I think it's important to not let that material Define you that you you want to instead of trying to write something that's like that because that was successful you you have to be bold enough to write something new and different from that otherwise you sort of get trapped by trying to repeat what you did that was original before yeah I agree that is definitely something I'm going through right now um because I I do a lot of Storytelling and a lot of my jokes hinge on one another to make sense which so when I'm doing a lot of short sets when I'm doing seven to 10 minute sets it's tough to get all that in there but when I do these longer sets it works because you know I have a joke about my dad that hinges on a joke about my brother that hinges on a joke about my girlfriend and uh I living together that hinges on a joke I have about Michael Phelps you know I mean it's it's this weird through line through most of it so that's now that I'm writing again it's um it's tough to go well that's a joke about somebody being drunk and I already had a joke about somebody being drunk so I'm going to basically be doing the same impression in the same voice and the same mannerisms and yeah so I'm trying to start thinking outside of of that material because that album specifically I think was about growing up uh right now in New York being in my 20s and what that means versus when my dad was in his 20s and that whole kind of d dnamic of what what is success now what is being an adult you know do you have to do all these things do you have to check off all the check all the boxes to make sure that you're the adult now you know or can I wait till I'm 35 to be technically an adult you know that kind of thing so yeah now I'm trying to write material beyond that what's what's next and it it's definitely tough because you just want to kind of sit back and you want to do the same stuff you were already doing and tell the same goofy jokes but you do need to grow and you know it makes me respect music a lot when these guys come out with albums and they're wildly different from the last one those are the the difficult ones right it's it's so easy to get trapped into trying to emulate what you did before that was successful right and and I also understand the difference between comedy and music big thing with comedy is there's a certain brand that you're attracted to a a comic because you relate to them or you like that brand and so I don't want to go too far outside of of the Willa's brand so to speak because then someone's like wait a minute why is he doing that and you know there it's it's tough cuz you're you're you're on that balance of well I want to do something new and different and edgy but I also don't want someone to come in and go oh man he really fell off or you know I liked when he told stories and now he's doing onliners and he's really bad at that I like when he told stories and now he's doing physical comedy with watermelons yeah yeah exactly or it's yeah know it's like I okay well we'll just say it's a onean show instead of Comedy now maybe that'll make up for it not being funny anymore you know that kind of thing no let's not do that let's keep it being funny yeah I'll do my best I think for for everyone's sake I'll do my best on that one you know what would you like people to do most do you want people to go to your website do you want to go to iTunes and and have them buy the album how would you like to tell people to to to follow up on this um well where I'm at now I mean if anyone wants to buy the album I'm I'd be ecstatic for you to keep buying the album but once uh once the pre-sales end and the actual you know the it's it's out for wide release I really think that streaming is where it uh starts you start moving into focusing on the streaming specifically because gets the numbers up there and when you get on the sites like uh you know like Spotify and apple music it starts floating around you get attached the playlists and it just it it broadens uh the the amount of people that it can actually reach so you know I wouldn't check it on my website because my website is embarrassingly bad uh that is a that's a year goal is to update the website it's just you know there's good WordPress sites and then there's my website and and I honestly I don't even know if they could find it if they went to my website because it's so hard to navigate I just did not set it up well at all so yeah uh honestly if you just type my name in there's I'm the only will Ables doing comedy uh I did notice that when you type will Ables into iTunes though you find my name in my album and then you find a lot of uh gospel music and Christian rock music because I think every album in the gospel or uh Christian rock genre says willing and able at some point so if you put gospel into your show yeah then you'll pick up all those people too the whole thing unlock yeah yeah I got the Willing Ena crowd but yeah I would just stream it I mean check it out you know if if you like it you can buy it but uh you know it really helps to get those numbers up and get it get some exposure with it and get it moving around fantastic well I I really appreciate you giving us time to talk about this I I want to thank you for going into details on the audio production side especially with the hiccup it's um it's not always easy to talk about uh where there have been problems and I I appreciate you're being open about that of course yeah I mean I also like to talk about it because there sometimes you do listen to it and you're like oh I really thought it would have sounded this way but then when you hear the backstory you're like oh wow I can't believe it sounded like that so so you know I'm I'm always open to talk about it uh it's kind of like yeah but you should have heard it before yeah if you heard the first night that's actually what I said to a couple people um and I do have a few friends that listened to it when it was just on my iPhone and they even said they're like oh yeah it it's it's pretty impressive what what both your editors did and what you guys turned out but when you only hear the one time you're like okay but you know I still think it sounds great I think you've got a lot to be proud of I mean you made it to number one on iTunes with all of these troubles in place and I I yeah am looking forward to what you do next oh thank you I'll make sure uh make sure you know about it fantastic thank you so much will Ables everybody and uh we will be back next week with another episode of the Apple Insider podcast well this has been the Apple Insider podcast episode 160 I'm your host VI and joining me has been Neil internet famous nerdy guy Hughes very famous let me tell you the and humble and nerdy don't forget if you want to reach us if you want to reach us please write to newsapple insider.com please tweet at us yeah I'm at V marks Neil you're I am uh so famous that I have a verified Twitter account and I am at this is Neil well there you go we we are all in awe of that you have one too I'm still in awe of that well there you go aren't you special that means when you tweet at a celebrity they get a notification they know that you're harassing them yes we will be happy to hear from you happy to respond to you and we're also happy when you leave us positive reviews on iTunes so thank you so much for that thank you for listening we will be back with more next week\n"