LAST EDITED ON May-07-10 AT 02:42 AM (EDT)
 
Testing a new mic today. Not headset-mounted like the one I've been using, which eliminates the danger of errant thumps and clicks from inadvertently touching the headset rig; on the other hand, to my ear the result sounds a little hollow, possibly because I haven't quite worked out the optimal position yet. (Can't put it directly in front of me, after all, because the monitor and keyboard need to be there.)

Anyway, here's a recording of "Mr. Midshipman Tenjou: For the Good of the Service" which I made to test it out. Not my greatest performance (you can tell I ran out of water toward the end), but it's mainly an equipment check anyhow. Let me know what you think of the sound quality. I think it may still need a bit of tweaking, but it's awfully hard to judge based on the sound of one's own voice; it always sounds a bit wrong anyway just because it's not coming from inside.

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

Sounds fairly decent to me, though (and this is purely nitpicking a good read) you could benefit from slowing your delivery down a touch.

For a non-head-mounted mic, try and keep your mouth around a fist's length away from the mic. I generally try and position the screen behind the mic and look 'down the barrel' at what I'm reading, but yours looks a lot wider than the models I'm used to so YMMV.

As a side note, hearing Utena's name pronounced is weird as hell when you've been pronouncing it differently in your head for years.

Audio quality sounds good to me. Playback was slightly glitch at times, but I figure that is a function of this old dinosaur I'm running at the moment.

I'll not comment on the quality of the vocal performance, as I tend to be to much of a squeeling UF fanboi to give you anything usefull... I like the story in text, I like it read, and if you ever go into radio with that voice I think you'd wind up so successfull you'd not have any time to write UF anymore.

I could only listen to about 10 minutes before I had to go to work, but I did notice that in some of the 'aside' moments, it got a little quiet and I had to strain to catch what was being said. The rest seemed fine, though.

>I could only listen to about 10 minutes before I had to go to work,
>but I did notice that in some of the 'aside' moments, it got a little
>quiet and I had to strain to catch what was being said. The rest
>seemed fine, though.

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>

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

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.

Thanks! And you not only got in the Jewish response, but you Philadelphia-ized it too! :P

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>

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

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.

I can't really say anything about the relative sound quality, but there's something I've been wanting to bring up for a while now: you're encoding these audio files at a rather high bitrate.

128 kilobit per second is appropriate when encoding professionally produced music, ripped from a CD, but it's almost ridiculously high for a recording of speech, captured with an ordinary microphone on a home computer. You could probably go as low as 64 kb/s without any loss of quality discernible with the human ear - especially if you used a 2-pass, variable-bitrate encoding with 64 kb/s as the target average.

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

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. 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. (If that all sounds a bit cavalier and half-assed, well, there's a reason the EPU Audio "album cover" motto is "amateurish but cheap". :)

>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.

>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.

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.

Just meant to say:

I love it. But what's with all the scottish accents?

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

>I love it. But what's with all the scottish accents?

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.

I get enough of them from my semi-SO.

"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 you have preferred Yorkshire?

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

>>Would you have preferred Yorkshire?
>
>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

>what's with all the scottish accents?

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.

My advice on the whole 'Learning RP' front would be to look for '50s Beeb news reports and/or dramas. They get compiled and dumped on BBC 4 once every couple of months; there was one quite recently on short films made in (to this youngling) olden times advertising Britain to the former colonies and suchlike. It'll most likely come around again, and I basically learned RP from that.

Yes, I am a complete sad act.

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

Unfortunately, we here in the Colonies don't get BBC4 unless we're very very lucky.

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!!"

Do you not get iPlayer (not Steve Jobs' pimp outfit) over in the States either? Meh... I'd say YouChoob it but there's that daft country-of-origin thing. Might not get it.

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.

>Do you not get iPlayer?

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

>Do you not get iPlayer (not Steve Jobs' pimp outfit) over in the
>States either?

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.

>>Do you not get iPlayer (not Steve Jobs' pimp outfit) over in the
>>States either?
>
>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."

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.

"Come on, you traitorous buggers! And when you get to Sto-Vo-Kor, Tell your ancestors that mad Ned Teach sent ye!"

I fuckin' love it.

The audio was fairly constant, I enjoy the lack of background clutter as well.

----
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