The explanation for why there's a difference in lengths requires us to take a radio trip around the sun (virtually, of course, in my radio piece, with sound effects that come entirely from my mouth plus a little boost from my engineer Manoli Wetherell).
Of course, good sound is subjective, so the app sets a concrete metric: It attempts to replicate exactly what an audio engineer hears inside a recording studio.
"We wanted to make it sounda bit like a Neil Young album, " says O'Brien, who recorded Becoming a Jackal with engineer and co-producer Tommy McLaughlin.