# What is a stinger, a sting or a bumper?

A stinger (or sting) is a short burst of music or sound — a second or two — that marks a transition: the end of a segment, the reveal of a topic, a cut to the interview. A bumper is the slightly longer version, five to fifteen seconds, that carries the show name and separates blocks.

They exist because a hard cut from one topic to the next feels abrupt, and a full piece of music is too much. The stinger says "something changed" in the time it takes to say it.

In Cast you generate a sound effect or a short musical cue from a prompt and drop it on the timeline at the boundary. Chapters are the natural place: the AI Mode beta reserves the gap between chapters for exactly this.

## Related

- [How do I add sound effects?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/generate-sfx)
- [How do I add chapters with timestamps?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/chapters)
- [Smart generate: a music bed per chapter, sound effects between them](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/smart-generate)
- [What is a cold open in a podcast?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/what-is-cold-open)

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Source: https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/what-is-stinger · Cast docs
Last updated: 2026-09-14