Music Only Screencast
May 26th, 2008 by Greg R Notess
I came across another screencast that only uses audio to add a music soundtrack. I was checking out the CrossLoop page which has a link to their demo video. Like the excellent CustomizeGoogle demo, the CrossLoop demo uses text within the screencast to communicate its main points. While I liked the screencast and watched most of it, I found that with this sound track I turned the volume all the way down part way through it. Is it more a sign of my musical tastes or do others share the opinion that the music at CrossLoop does not work while the CustomizeGoogle does?
Not to sound too negative to this screencast, I do like a couple of other aspects of the CrossLoop demo:
- Small size (video window about 320×240 pixels, delivered by default as a pop-up)
- The way it zooms in to the relevant section (it looks to me like it was created with Camtasia Studio 5 using the new SmartFocus pan and zoom feature.
For me, this is a good example of how adding music may turn out to take too much time and energy to find an engaging track that is not distracting from the information content.
You don’t have to listen very hard or for very long to realize that the CrossLoop music is just a short audio loop (10 secs?).
Perhaps it’s an audio file that downloads and replays — the goal being to conserve bandwidth.
Yes, it’s annoying.