I had that issue too. I _think_ I listened to about half of it before I fell asleep, but that had nothing to do with the story or your delivery (sounded good up until then) and everything to do with the fact that I had a 3-day old daughter and was downright exhausted...

Offsides (proud father of little Hailey Elyse, born at 9:39am on 5/4/2010!)

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Now how the hell did I manage to miss noticing that before? (I just reread the thread looking for JTB's notes on bit rate.) Mazel tov, yo.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Don't worry about missing it, though I must admit I was surprised that nobody responded before now...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Did you not get my email of congrats, sent right after you posted that?

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

>Just out of curiosity, what software do you use for capturing,
>post-processing and encoding?

Lately, NCH WavePad. Its main pros as I saw them last time I was looking around were that a) there's a free version and b) it's not full of abstruse command-liney weirdness like a lot of free software. I didn't want to have to learn calculus just to record some MP3s, although one of these days I'll have to see if I can get it (or something) to ring modulate.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>As to bitrate, I seem to recall going lower than 128 on some earlier
>tests (by "earlier" I mean several years ago) and finding that the
>result sounded rather shite, but it's not really a technology I'm
>conversant with the in-and-out details of, so it's entirely possible I
>had some other setting wrong at the time.

Well, I did notice that some of the previous recordings had different sample rates - e.g. most of the first chapter of _The Iron Age_ is sampled at 22050 Hz, which is rather low (thus making a high bitrate even more of an overkill).

>IIRC, I ended up going with
>the rate I did because it's identified as "CD quality" in the pulldown
>menu, and I figured that was pretty good.

It is. At 128 kb/s you'd have to be a trained sound technician, listening on high-end studio equipment to be able to tell any difference from the uncompressed original. Which is why, unless the original recording was created on professional, high-end studio equipment, 128 kb/s is usually more that is needed.

>>Just out of curiosity, what software do you use for capturing,
>>post-processing and encoding?
>
>Lately, NCH WavePad. Its main pros as
>I saw them last time I was looking around were that a) there's a free
>version and b) it's not full of abstruse command-liney weirdness like
>a lot of free software.

Heh, yeah. I'll have to check it out and see what options are available for MP3 encoding in that program. For example, if it has the ability to encode at an average bitrate, rather than a constant one, you can squeeze more quality into a smaller file.

>I didn't want to have to learn calculus just
>to record some MP3s, although one of these days I'll have to see if I
>can get it (or something) to
>ring modulate.

Heheheh! I've been looking into that myself, though I haven't actually tried it yet. There's a ring modulator plugin for the popular freeware audio program Audacity, and even some tutorials on the web on how to achieve decent Dalek voice effects with it.

It does, but I've known files encoded that way to cause problems on playback in the past and wanted to avoid the possibility of one of mine giving people the hassle, so I don't use it. The gains don't really seem to be worth the potential tsuris.

>There's a ring modulator plugin for the
>popular freeware audio program Audacity

... speaking of abstruse weirdness. I remember trying to use that once and wondering whether the person who designed its control interface was being deliberately obtuse in an effort to weed out the insufficiently 1337. Which was me. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>It does, but I've known files encoded that way to cause problems on
>playback in the past and wanted to avoid the possibility of one of
>mine giving people the hassle, so I don't use it.

I remember, several years ago I had an audio player that didn't handle variable bitrates well. It gave completely wrong playtimes for MP3s with VBR and seeking within such files was almost impossible. Nowadays that's not such a common problem anymore; most media players know how to handle VBR audio or video streams properly, scanning the encoded frames instead of simply dividing the file size by the bitrate of the first frame.

Nevertheless, you are right that MP3s with a constant bitrate are more straight-forward and less likely to cause conflicts. I only mentioned VBR as a possibility.

>... speaking of abstruse weirdness.

Heheheh! I suspected Audacity was one of the programs to which you were referring. It's a step up from using pure command-line tools like FFMPEG or BeSweet with a GUI frontend cobbled together by some other geek for his own purposes - but it's still miles away from intuitive or user-friendly.

WavePad also allows you to use VST plugins, but when I tried that with the "killerringer" DLL, the control window that popped up for it only contained a checkbox labelled "mute", rather than the three sliders you get when using it in Audacity.

Would you have preferred Yorkshire?

--G.
there's nowt wrong wi' gala luncheons, lad!
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"It's difficult keeping up with the cross-continuity, but I think Cosmouse just gave The Saturnian Scraphunter his Ultimate Pacifier to use against Galactapuss..."

Would that have involved a risen-from-the-ranks Richard Sharpe as a marine officer?

I never read the books, but young Sean Bean...yummy.

Anyway, a proper Yorkshire accent would be a hoot. I'm looking foward to your next installment.

t.

Trigger Argee
trigger_argee@hotmail.com
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - HST

More seriously, Mad Ned Teach talks like that because he's Blackbeard and all cartoon pirates talk like they're either from Scotland or Cornwall. As for the others, well, they're supposed to sound like Star Wars Imperial officers, but apparently my Received Pronunciation isn't up to the job.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Yes, I am a complete sad act.

---
"Together we will build an empire of a million shining suns." -- Dave, Dictator of Utopia.

Which is sad, because to me that sounds like tremendous fun to watch, especially the news reports, seeing how the news was reported back then.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

But yeah. The show in mind was a clip show made of short films commissioned by the Foreign Office to show everyone how wonderful Britain was. Some are absolutely priceless. There's one that's an interview with the inventor of the hovercraft... awesome.

---
"Together we will build an empire of a million shining suns." -- Dave, Dictator of Utopia.

Nope, not even in those countries where Liz is still the head of state.

No, in fact, it's deliberately disabled. This is particularly annoying when surfing the BBC's program websites, since promotional clips (like the behind-the-scenes ones that pop up in the little mini-games on the Doctor Who site, or the ones on the Top Gear site) return an officious little NOT AUTHORISED IN YOUR AREA screen instead. Basically, the Beeb is saying, "You don't pay the licence fee; fuck off."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

A particularly good version of that happened on Christmas or New Year's last year, where if you tried to watch Dr Who Christmas special you'd get the NOT AUTHORISED banner superimposed over Timothy Dalton looking suitably malevolent.

>No, in fact, it's deliberately disabled. This is particularly
>annoying when surfing the BBC's program websites, since promotional
>clips (like the behind-the-scenes ones that pop up in the little
>mini-games on the Doctor Who site, or the ones on the Top
>Gear site) return an officious little NOT AUTHORISED IN YOUR AREA
>screen instead.

Yeah, that annoyed me too. I configured a UK-based anonymous proxy in my browser, specifically so I could turn it on when browsing the BBC website. That fixes the problem.