Cautionary Tales of an Almost-Defaulter: How I Learned to Play It Safe, Safer, Safest with Audacity

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

I read "Eight Sessions" in collaboration with fleurrochard as team fleur_de_li, and I'd like to preface this [ginormous] post by saying that I almost defaulted.

Two preliminary thoughts on podfic: I believe podficcing comes down to luxury and/or patience.

I have the luxury of stretches of uninterrupted, quiet hours – no kids of pesky partners, no long workhours. I have the luxury of living in a relatively quiet neighbourhood, in a relatively quiet house. I have the luxury of a room of my own. I have the luxury of being able to buy relatively decent recording equipment, and of buying new equipment on a whim if I destroy my stuff.

Despite this all, recording and editing only 4h of podfic drove me batshit insane at points. Because what I lack is patience. Patience (and here I subsume devotion and joy and everything else that keeps you going) is probably the only thing that may make up for lack of the luxuries I counted above.

So, assuming that my circumstances are comparatively ideal (more expensive, quality equipment and a non-streetside room pretty much the only potential technical improvements), I want to express my sincere respect to everyone who finished this project, however unpolished. I draw my hat to you for braving the odds: Thank you.

I also want to express my understanding and sympathies to everyone who defaulted. The things that kept me from turning defaulter were my luxuries (no 1 being almost unlimited time to sink into this project) and my devotion to my podficcing partner, fleurrochard and to my podfic instigator, general_jinjur

I would never have kept at it if not for the love of you two, dears. It was the only thing that did keep me going in the end. I simply could not bear the thought of disappointing you.

Collaborative podficcing: worth it.

Here's the thing – I hadn't read the fine print. It's called podbang, okay, but I totally didn't make the connection to BIG bang – it was Fleur who pointed out to me that the whole point was recording LONG fics. By that point I had already signed up. OH NO LIAN NO. So I roped the ever-patient Fleur into being my podficcing partner. (She's a singer, an all-around genial person, and had a role in the Written by the Victors podfic behemoth, so I felt instantly safe with her by my side.)

On the one hand, it's an illusion to think collaborating will cut the work in half. I'd guess that the work stays roughly the same. We had to negotiate shared fandoms and plow through tons of loooong stories in order to find something that we'd both love enough to record, nevermind that we had to find something told from two roughly equally represented viewpoints. (Luckily, there's this miracle called cesperanza, who wrote just what we needed.)
And once you get to recording, you will almost always have completely different recording equipment and environments, which makes matching the sound quality more difficult. There's the hassle of cleaning up your files for the editing partner and upload them somewhere etc.

On the other hand, you have a partner in crime to squee with, to beta for you, to listen to you whine later at night, to encourage you and to hold your hand if need be. And that is pretty much invaluable. Plus, it's great to be able to listen to someone else's voice for a change when editing!

Calling all authors: podfic policies

Most podfic readers thank the author of the story they record for giving permission. But that's not quite how I want to put it. I believe that making a transformative work off a transformative work is, frankly, my right, even though I accept that in fandom, the social etiquette is necessarily different. Refraining from recording if it makes the author truly uncomfortable is the thing to do, absolutely.

But I *am* grateful to cesperanza, not because she gave permission to record the fic -- she did! and she did so gracefully and encouragingly (<3!).

I am grateful that she has an open and known policy (well, word of mouth, but) of allowing transformative works of her work, that you don't *need* to ask. It was just such a huge relief to know that we wouldn't, in all likelihood, be shot down. It was one less thing to fret about. THANK YOU!

So, to all the creators out there -- making your stance clear on this issue is a wonderful and helpful thing to do and may result in more of you fics being recorded :D (I totally stole this point from general_jinjur -- she made a similar argument once, I think.)

Personal: whining

I don't want to go into everything that went wrong with this project, which was one of the most emotionally exhausting things I've done in a long, long time. My friends all let out cries of relief when I told them I was finally, finally done. It was a mix of cockiness (I used to do a fair share of audio editing a couple of years back and had worked with Audacity before, and then I had to go and play Dragon:Age Origins for two weeks straight because I thought I could afford it – HAH, HAH), being a terrible, terrible reader, technical difficulties, and heaps of bad luck(/clumsiness. Why yes, I killed *both* my headphones and my first microphone. -_-;). I still haven't quite figured out how Audacity kept eating and mangling my files, which meant I had to re-re-re-re-rerecord everything even after I thought I had already finished editing and repairing those segments. But I did manage to learn or guess a couple of things, so I hope next year's podbang aspirants may profit from my failures.

Technical: my Audacity mistakes and how to avoid them

I started working with Audacity 1.3 Beta on Windows Vista (in German, so some descriptions are loose translations). (3 GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo 2 GHz processor, so, decent.) I switched to the latest stable 1.2 version and then back to the latest 1.3 version.

In retrospect, even though I was definitely serious and had plans and contingency plans (yeah, lol), I still approached Podbang too lightly. As cold_poet below said: don't get cocky.

If you are new to podficcing, prone to terrible accidents and/or sloppiness (like, y'know, me), you should treat it as a project akin to writing your dissertation: with care and lots and lots of safety nets. My quick-and-dirty tips for podfic newbies and clumsy people:

• 1)Read software/podfic tutorials. Trial and error is great, but time-intensive, and you'll only familiarize yourself with a couple of functions. Plus, saving time will be really, really important later.


• 2)Save each chapter/part/segment into a separate project file.
  
• 3)Back up early, back up often, keep different save files of different stages. (yes, this assumes you have enough disk space :/ see 'luxuries' above.)


• 4)After editing, EXPORT EACH FILE TO .WAV FORMAT and reimport into Audacity when continuing to edit later.

To go into detail, here's part of what I did wrong (I suppose), and what I, personally, strongly advise AGAINST doing:

• Mistake 1: I recorded everything into one master file.


• Mistake 2: When doing cpu-heavy processing (say, applying effects), I sometimes had other programs running in the background. This may or may not contribute to Audacity crashing.


• Mistake 3: impatience. When Audacity is processing something? Don't click anywhere else. Don't make it do too many things at once. Batch processing? Wonderful idea, but unless you are very confident in your computer's stability and processing power, don't.


• Mistake 4: [i.e. THE FATAL ONE, as it later turned out.] When Audacity crashes, and it will, NEVER CHOOSE "RESTORE FILE" ON THE NEXT STARTUP: IT WILL DEVOUR YOUR FILE, CHEW IT TO DEATH AND SPIT OUT THE GRISLY REMAINS WITH A TOOTHY GRIN. Translation: for unknown reasons, some snippets will simply go missing, and your beautifully edited segment will be a pile of disjointed snippets.


• Mistake 5: Related to #4. Never choose "delete unassociated segments" when prompted. (Originally intended to clear out the clutter: all the snippets you cut out and discarded, i.e. Those no longer represented in your project file. Except. Since Audacity, through the "restore file" command after a crash, randomly pilfers some snippets from your project file, you will delete potentially vital snippets FOREVER with this prompt. GONE. Yay. Have fun re-recording!)


• Mistake 6: Don't neglect backups.

Audacity 1.3: Useful Effects – please discuss!

Audacity 1.3 Beta kept crashing, so I switched to the stable 1.2 version, which continued to crash. So I switched back to 1.3. because it has the better effects. To wit:

Compressor/Leveller

One of the most time-consuming tasks was manually adjusting the levels (by selecting loud sections and quieting them, or boosting v. quiet sections, by way of + or – Amplify.) Turns out this is exactly what a Compressor does automatically: tone down the loud sections while leaving the quiet ones intact (Leveller, I'm told, is just an extreme compressor.) Found this out way too late into editing to still make use of. Cursed myself heartily.

Remove Noise

Will warp your recording weirdly if overdone, nevermind that complete silence sounds dead. Really useful if applied lightly. (I used the values 12/ 400 / 0,35 on Fleur's parts, which had more background noise). Because it would filter out certain ranges (usually higher pitch), I used it in combination with

Equalizer

...to strengthen the ranges that other filters had flattened and/or tone down undesireable ones. (I didn't quite figure this one out as well as I'd've liked – I built some half-assed custom equalizer profiles.) There probably is a better solution, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Change Tempo

I read too fast, so this came in handy, even if I only discovered it as an afterthought. I used it v. mildly (-3% at the most), because it would mess up all my carefully-edited the pauses (once a pause lasts the tiniest bit longer than 1,5~2sec or so it becomes a silence/break, and that just feels uncomfortable to me.)

On pauses

A word on pauses – keep them. Keeeeeep theeeeem. I was sad I had to cut out *all* my breathing, because my mic picked it up all tinny and Darth Vader-ish, but I took care to re-insert all the natural breaks and stops. Luckily Fleur had a much more natural breathing sound in her recordings, so I could keep that.

I personally find it hard to process reading that is too fast, but that's probably due to the fact that English is a foreign language to me, and apart from pop songs I don't hear it much IRL.

My biggest regrets

My number 1 regret is that I simply did not manage to send our recording to be beta'd. We had a wonderful beta offer, and I am really sad I could not, in the end, take advantage of it. (There's also the thing where I cease communciating completely when I am in panic mode, which, well. Not fun for my collaborators.) I really do want to say: I am really sorry, assigned beta listener. I have no doubt you would have helped us improve the podfic tremendously. :(

My number 2 regret is that I simply recorded all wrong, and I kept recording wrong. I became world champion in identifying my plopping plosives, because hey, that would be every.single.one.of.them. OMG.

Meta-y: on reading and pleasure

I love hearing people speak. That's pretty much the appeal of podfic to me, right there. And I love my own voice. Recording is something intensely personal and intensely narcissistic for me. I have always been very proud and at the same time very insecure of my voice. (I had surgery two years back which had a chance of damaging my vocal cords. Cue intense angst. Came out alright though, phew!) But I hate the way I read. I know I slur words, I read too fast, my sibilants are too harsh and my plosives too hard. I stumble over every second word. It's bad when I read in German, it's almost impossible when I read in English.

But, hey. My voice is really nice. I like my voice! And so I do it anway.

And I imagine that every podfic reader has these kinds of negotiations – has insecurities and limitations, bursts of pride and satisfaction, and I imagine this, this is like writing Mary Sue, that self-centered pleasure, being imperfect and unashamed, despite it all. Maybe I am odd, but the listener does not figure into this initial negotiation at all. So when I download something and am annoyed at the quality – and I have been -- well, maybe it's not *for* me.

Maybe there should be "am recording for pleasure, am not looking for feedback" disclaimers, and its opposite, on podfic as well. (Except, yeah I know, it's not that easy – for one, that would presuppose one is always completely aware of one's motivations. Still.)

Comments

[yasmine32068.livejournal.com]

HMMM This was really interesting... I use Audacity and yeah there are times when I wanna chuck the whole thing out of the window. It'll cut out WHILE I'm recording... Editing... Breathing too hard... Whatever!

What I really found useful was your tips, especially on keeping the breathing. I have been triming the little intakes of air before I start reading and you are the first who's said to keep them.

Thanks for sharing this... It's really useful!

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

thank you, I found I really should look more into technical, hands-on posts (both the reading and the writing). I've wondered why Audacity stops recording sometimes too -- maybe there's a setting in preferences? (But "Sound Actiuvated Recording" is unticked for me, so... no idea!)

And I never find simple breathing noises distracting unless they are weirdly enhanced by the mic, it would be interesting to find if other people think differently! (poll time?)

[general-jinjur.livejournal.com]

<3

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

zoom zoom zoom! *snugs*

[dodificus.livejournal.com]

The more I read about people's experiences with Audacity the more it freaks me the fuck out. At least I've never lost any files with garageband:)

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

Yup, that would be the #1 advantage! I used to have ProTools Free on my ages-old Mac >_>; I miiiiss eeet. But with my hard-earned wisdom I'm fairly confident I could take on Audacity again and not die next time around ^^;

[cybel]

As a listener, I think it's a good thing that I've not really had time to start listening to many of the Podbang podfics. I think these meta posts will greatly enhance my enjoyment when I do listen because of feeling I know the readers better. :-)

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

(I've almost made it through 2, now I need to cook up proper feedback!) I kind of want to know the story behind every podbang podfic ^^;

and thank you so much for creating the audiobook versions. Not only are they pretty & super-practical, but smaller, too, which often saves me some download headaches <3 <3 <3

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I was sad I had to cut out *all* my breathing, because my mic picked it up all tinny and Darth Vader-ish, but I took care to re-insert all the natural breaks and stops. Yup. That one!!!

I am glad I realized that early on, and I actually lengthen and shorten breaks when I listen to it again depending on the pacing I think the story requires.

Re Audacity, my one big learning thing was to never ever save anything in the Audacity format, bc that screws even the wav files. And I've become a big fan of shorter files (10-20 min) which is what I can edit in one go as well...

Only thing I object to...it's *not* a diss :) i only wish a diss could be written in 6-8 weeks :)

that was a great post!!! thanks!!! <3

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

thank you for reading! I'm still working my way through the lively discussion at your inspiring post (which did help me to write this one.)

Man, I wish I had known that the Audacity file system would mercilessly stab me in the back. I'd only done this one 40min fic before, but that was on XP, and I didn't have any there trouble at all.

Only thing I object to...it's *not* a diss :) i only wish a diss could be written in 6-8 weeks :)

:#) I was grasping at something sufficiently awe-inspiring and may have exaggerated a wee bit! ;)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I'm seriously so impressed (& delighted) you guys took this on! I cannot wait to hear it! (& I'm sorry it was such a hassle!)

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

Thank you :D and, well, it *is* called a "challenge", so I shouldn't have been all so surprised that it was ;)

[fleurrochard]

Thank you from me as well! (And the story was a joy to read!)

[fleurrochard]

*HUGHUGHUG*

[fleurrochard]

And also: your voice IS really nice. Absolutely!

[pennyplainknits.livejournal.com]

hmmm, compressor you say....

I've never used it, but I did a dual voice podfic too, as you know, and I wonder whether it would have helped get rid of the strange echo-yness in parts of our recording.

How stable is 1.3? I'm using 1.2.6 at the moments, and I've not had that many problems (crosses fingers). Something I have learned is that you can sometimes recover temp files as .aup files, but you'll end up with a ton of maybe 10 second long files which you then have to paste together...

I always save as an mp3 straight away, rather than saving as .wav or whatever. I don't know whether that makes a difference in anything, but I feel better knowing its an mp3.

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, I still have to listen to your joint fic and, hey, maybe I have a suggestion or two, having battled with sound quality myself.

I think it's just Vista & Audacity for me -- don't know why. I found 1.3 as stable as anything else, i.e. not really, so that's not very helpful ^^; but I would give it a spin just for the new effects & better commands alone.

I hate the Audacity file retention system with a passion -- unlabelled 30sec snippets, urgh. Which wouldn't be totally fatal if not for my mistakes #4 and #5.

I never save as mp3 straight away because I want the material to stay uncompressed as long as it's still in its raw stages -- and .wav is saver than .aup and closest to uncompressed, plus just about any program can read and edit .wav, should it come down to it. Just a preference, really.

[emeraldsedai.livejournal.com]

You and I have a bit in common in the "advantages" department, and I'll even claim patience. I'm very, very patient and focused. I like my voice, I like recording, I have a singing background, and I LOVE the editing part, which I spent vast, happy swaths of time on.

And still...

And still, my podbang entry (first long podfic for me) is deeply flawed! Deeply.

In hindsight, I'd have sent each section out for beta as I finished it. As it was, I left it too late.

I learned two very important things on the non-technology side that I'll pass along: mouth breathing and a slow metronome.

After I'd edited out TEN BILLION SKILLION mouth-noises (little breath-slurps, sniffing inhalations followed by smacks, etc.), I started training myself to breathe through my mouth while recording. Dry, dry, dry--but it's way easier to edit out a long drink of water here and there than the aforementioned billion-skillion smacky-gaspy-breathy noises.

And the metronome! I loaded a little metronome app on my phone and have slowed myself down signficantly by practicing with it, leaving a beat (inaudible to the microphone--I'm listening to it in one earbud) between sentences. Again, way easier to edit down a too-long pause than to squeeze a pause in between an elided pair of consonants.

And finally, water. I don't think it's really possible to be TOO hydrated before starting to read.

If I had it to do over again...

Wait! I do! I can make more podfic! \o/

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

It's so interesting, because I was really, really dejected about our podbang -- despite all good intentions, and all advantages, it turned out so badly. Well, you know. Not *bad*! Just worse than I would have liked.

But at the same time, now that I am no longer in agony over making the deadline and having no life anymore because I had to use it all up for editing...well. My ambition is sparked, a bit? I really, really DO want to do better.

It definitely helps to hear about other people's experiences and difficulties, too. It makes me feel less like a failure, because, well everyone fails a little bit, yes?

And those are two definitely interesting tips! I'll have to try the mouth-breathing one (hee, that does sound weird :P). Breath noises just about broke my neck.

http://community.livejournal.com/amplificathon/382511.html?view=1913391#t1913391
I found that the more I read, the better I got about reading more slowly, but since I recorded over the course of 3 months (October-December), my style & voice oscillates all over the place. (I got distracted from this comment by looking for mobile phone metronome apps, btw :D)

looking forward to listening to your recording then~!

[luzula]

Haven't started listening to your podfic yet, but I'm looking forward to it!

It's funny how Audacity keeps crashing for people. I run Audacity on Ubuntu Linux, and I don't have any problems. Of course, I record on an external recorder and only import it into Audacity for editing.

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Man, I'd love to record externally! But I'm too cheap to buy a decent digital recorder ^^;

I think it's the combination of Vista + Audacity rather than Audacity itself. *shakes tiny fist*

[mific.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the sensible tips about Audacity, which I use. It hasn't crashed on any projects for me, maybe as I use it on a Mac (unlike dodificus I couldn't figure out how to use garageband, or at least, Audacity suited me better for the editing). But, yeah, I'm hopeless about doing back-ups and with long fics it's only a matter of time before I get caught out. The techie suggestions are really great - I'll try them out. I also edit out breathing, since mine seems to be at obscene-phone-call levels, but I do paste in gaps instead of the breathing and edit the pauses to make the pace flow properly. Good point about the dead air thing - I artificially made some "gap" footage by deamplifying down to a flatline, and it just sounds weird. THanks for the tempo suggestion as I definitely read too fast. Looking forward to listening to your podbang.

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

I think it's Audacity & Windows Vista especially that don't play well together, so most other OS shouldn't experience that obscene level of difficulties.

And hah, yes, I realized I really need to work on my cavalier attitude re. backups. It's such a common-sense thing! ...and I always forget >_>;

*nods* I always copy a bit of "silence", i.e. pure room-athmosphere and paste it over my breathing/smacking noises (I smack my lips a lot, it seems!).

re. fast reading, I'll have to look into the metronome suggestion emeraldsedai posted below, but always read from the sheet (my computer is situated further off, fan noise is simply too loud) so I'm not sure I can apply this. Worth trying, though.

[wihluta.livejournal.com]

I love audacity and never had any problems with it. I still use 1.2.6, combined with the lame encoder (I hate wav, prefer mp3, don't ask me why. lol).

What I've found is that it's easier to never record files longer than 50-60 minutes. Best length is around 40mins. A) it's hard to read for that long and B)editing the whole thing makes me twitchy. Yeah, I have the same problem with patience as you. ;)

But generally I love reading long stories. I much prefer them to short stuff. I wish I'd noticed podbang when it was still time... Maybe next year. :D

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

I only compress my files to .mp3 once I'm done editing because I want to work from uncompressed raw files, and .wav comes closest there.

I, uhm, admit that one of my really bad habits is that I record a bunch of stuff and NOT edit it straight away. That's partly laziness, partly because quiet recording time is so precious -- I usually have a window from, say, 9pm to 11pm, but I often only come home around 10 or 11pm, so it can get tight. (and the weekends my street is full of party-goers at night, ugh.) [then again, I realized v. late that the car noises I'm so paranoid about don't actually register in the recording. ...huh.]

So sometimes I did have to record for up to two hours because, well, when all my old files got scrambled I was seriously running out of time, especially quiet recording time! And I could then edit during noisy times. That allows for a ton of mistakes to sneak in, though :/

(I kind of would like to do a podplay once -- you know, rewrite/record a fanfic radio play-style, with multiple actors? Because that's the only way I could imagine pulling off something with a multitude of voices like "With Six You Get Eggroll".)

[yukisherry.livejournal.com]

nice to hear your thoughts and tips! :)

[lian-li.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time to read it! :)