Another long day working on The Intangible Man stories. All have been recorded satisfactorily now, but there's quite a lot of work in balancing and processing, checking the levels and examining each pause, click, fizzle, in the audio. Audio proofing takes a lot of time. This book is 2 hours 47 mins of audio, a long time to listen to even once.
I'm struck by the possibility that I could program something to process these... eliminate peaks then level out the volume correctly. Software optimised for audiobooks. Then add a second layer of sound effects, or a touch of reverb. This isn't that easy, however. This is a lot of audio to process... all of my audio processing so far has taken place in memory; 90 seconds at a time at most. And, of course, the audio tools I use do all of this anyway. The difference is, I could design a non-lossy system. Now, I have to take the raw recordings, balance, limit, gate, filter, then (perhaps) apply sounds or reverb. I can't keep a copy of each step along the way, 3 hours is too much audio, so it makes future editing difficult.
Perhaps we've become 'addicted to undo' though. Almost all craft-work until the digital era was one-way and there was no undo. It's rare that we want to go back and change something; it's a sort of insecurity to want to hold on to every stage... yet, sometimes this is useful, particularly when doing something for a first time. For the time being, I'm keeping a copy of the raw start, and the final end waves, as well as the final MP3. I'm unsure whether to keep the raw start OR the final edited ends... the former allows more tweaks if needed, though will need changing from the outset. Why keep a wav that's the same as the MP3? I could even forget the wav entirely and only retain the MP3, an ultimate casual attitude, though my professional-archive self doesn't like that idea.
At 6pm, I diverted to launch the first SFXEngine sale, and announce the release of the first DLC for it, the Analogue VCF.
I've spent all week on this book and it's still not finished. John mentioned The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death in the foreword, and the fact that that book was first published in 2015 (its first draft written in 2012; the second edition updated and published in 2021), and that these stories were published in 2020 might make people think that these stories were written later, when they were generally written earlier, most of them in 2011. This is why the writing is better in the novel.
Still, the quality of the language is one thing, it's the core ideas of these tales that's the important part. Each of these would make for a good television programme. Surreal, strange, and imaginative.
