Dvader said:Make the Punch-Out theme the intro music for the podcast.
Damn right!
On the technical side, you need to work on your sound levels. You're all in places fading in and out, most dramatically Iga, who goes from silent to blaring in the middle of a sentence at one point. Foolz was really low and poor quality throughout.
Primarily, it is manageable is your levels are consistent. If it's a bit loud of quiet, it's easily adjustable, but if it's in and out, that leaves a lot of work and it's just going to be rougher.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
Yodariquo said:Podcast all up and posted. Great work on the format, the roundtable approach really worked.
On the technical side, you need to work on your sound levels. You're all in places fading in and out, most dramatically Iga, who goes from silent to blaring in the middle of a sentence at one point. Foolz was really low and poor quality throughout.
Primarily, it is manageable is your levels are consistent. If it's a bit loud of quiet, it's easily adjustable, but if it's in and out, that leaves a lot of work and it's just going to be rougher.
Different microphone this time. Strange that it's worse quality, caues the things I've recorded with it (haven't checked the podcast) have been of better quality. It is quieter, though. Do you edit them in Audacity? Cause you can adjust the sound level on that for individual audio tracks.. You probably know that, though. 
Foolz said:Yodariquo said:Podcast all up and posted. Great work on the format, the roundtable approach really worked.
On the technical side, you need to work on your sound levels. You're all in places fading in and out, most dramatically Iga, who goes from silent to blaring in the middle of a sentence at one point. Foolz was really low and poor quality throughout.
Primarily, it is manageable is your levels are consistent. If it's a bit loud of quiet, it's easily adjustable, but if it's in and out, that leaves a lot of work and it's just going to be rougher.Different microphone this time. Strange that it's worse quality, caues the things I've recorded with it (haven't checked the podcast) have been of better quality. It is quieter, though. Do you edit them in Audacity? Cause you can adjust the sound level on that for individual audio tracks.. You probably know that, though.
I have been thinking that we should all send our individual records already filtered for BG noise and with even DB. I know a guy that is a pro musician. He should know about technicalities. I'll ask him today.
Maybe our changing sound levels are not because of equipment, but our own voice inflections. Maybe there are exercises to minimize this stuff.
LOL best opening ever, music and pre-amble. Keep that and use it for every podcast please.
Nice chat so far.
Metroid talk, shut it Dvader! Metroid Prime 2 was awesome. It's harder, darker and more complicated. It's not the MGS2 of the series, it's like the Majora's Mask of the series IMO.
The light dark mechanic brings something new to the mix, which I appreciated. It's definetely more hardcore and challenging but I appreciated that challenge. I almost feel like Prime 1 is a training ground and 2 is where the challenge really begins.
MP3 is more user friendly, it still has the same complexity of maps, its just that the lifts are replaced by ship cutscenes. Prime 1 is one of the best games ever.
I think all the games are around 13 hours each, maybe prime 2 will take longer to beat. The bosses in 2 are harder too.
IF, they decide to release this 3 pack in Europe I would sell my own Metroid Prime trilogy on ebay with the two cube games and MP3.
That's a good way to justify a purchase.
gamingeek said:LOL best opening ever, music and pre-amble. Keep that and use it for every podcast please.
Nice chat so far.
Metroid talk, shut it Dvader! Metroid Prime 2 was awesome. It's harder, darker and more complicated. It's not the MGS2 of the series, it's like the Majora's Mask of the series IMO.
The light dark mechanic brings something new to the mix, which I appreciated. It's definetely more hardcore and challenging but I appreciated that challenge. I almost feel like Prime 1 is a training ground and 2 is where the challenge really begins.
MP3 is more user friendly, it still has the same complexity of maps, its just that the lifts are replaced by ship cutscenes. Prime 1 is one of the best games ever.
I think all the games are around 13 hours each, maybe prime 2 will take longer to beat. The bosses in 2 are harder too.
Meh, I didn't like MP2 nearly as much as MP1.
Keep listening, any more comments?
darthhomer said:I has comment. What are we doing for this week?
I am free.
You are always free, cheap ass slut. Move those buttocks.
Dvader said:This week doesn't concern me, the next one after that will be our first E3 MEGA SUPER PODCAST EXTRAVAGANZA!!! It will have to be like 2 hours long. We need everyone to be on, an all star cast.
Damn straight. And I should be back for this week.
I like the roundtable format introduced in the last podcast, so I'd be intereseted in going that route again. Also, something interesting usually comes up in the post-podcast lingering discussion, so to try and capitalize a bit on that, maybe something at the end about what we plan to do in the next week, gaming-related or not.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileTalked to my man Skitch about sound quality in the podcast, and the main two points he adressed were:
Microphone quality. Which means getting the best mic you can afford, and Normalizing tracks before sending them in for editing.
This is his post:
1. To improve audio quality, the improvements have to begin at the source, and work their way towards the product. The number one thing that results in poor sounding voice recordings are poor quality microphones. I don't know exactly what mics you are all using, so I can't comment on each person individually, but there is a definite gap in quality between some of the microphones, with some of them being relatively clear and decent, and others being as bad as telephones, if not worse.
2. Normalizing - I think Audacity has this feature, and it is one that each of you can do, as well as whomever is editing the clips together. Normalizing takes whatever part of the clip is loudest, and instantly boosts its level up to make it as close to digital zero (the loudest audio can be without distorting), as to make the clip generally louder. In addition, there are other more advanced audio techniques that can be used to reduce the overall dynamic range (the distance between the loudest and softest parts of the audio), so that the overall level seems louder (namely through techniques like audio compression), but again, these are more advanced.
I'll keep asking him stuff like this. I just listened to the podcast, and by the middle mark there is a substantial decrease in sound levels.
This translates over to the audio levels. Normalizes helps balance the volume between different tracks, but when the individual recordings fade in and out, only manually increasing the volume in sections can resolve this. I do what I can, but it's just impractical to do a precise job of it. Normalizing does little good on an individual basis because you'd individually only have one track. Though Foolz has had some significant DC offset, so it would fix that at least.
Example:
There are plenty of sections that go like that, from full good volume, to sounding very far away. When your volume is low to start, amplifying that creates lower quality. Additionally, Audacity has no way of determining what parts are too low, so it can't even that out and I'd have to select the lower portion to and increase the volume, then do it for the second section.
You can do it in the reverse to a degree, where the software can find what sections are past a certain volume level in order to balance everything out, but going that route as it is we have sections that are barely audible. Bringing everything down to that level simply would not work.
This is our main issue.
If anything's going to be done with this, the hardware problems are going to have to be worked out. I suggest try test recordings with the Skype testing service and see if you can get good recordings. If necessary, we can try to organize ahead of time on a podcast or afterword to work on what issues may be outstanding on what's causing an issue. If you just blindly record and send it off, you'll never see any problem.
I'm working on better addressing when there are volume disparencies, but in the end, fixing the source is better overall.
Just for perspective so it doesn't look like laziness here, the podcast takes about 2.5 hours of editing per 1 hour of recording as it is.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileYodariquo said:
Just for perspective so it doesn't look like laziness here, the podcast takes about 2.5 hours of editing per 1 hour of recording as it is.
Yeah, well it takes 1 hour of recording per hour, so stop being so lazy!
Edit:
anyway, listening to the podcast I'm guessing you had to amplify my recording a lot? The clarity of it un-amplified sounds a lot better than the old mic to me, but yeah it sounds very tinny after being amplified.
I'm not sure there's a way around it beyond getting a different mic (the old one died spontaneously), but I'll try playing around with Audacity. I can also put the microphone in my mouth so that it picks up a little more sound.
Not sure how to try and fix the DC off-set, though. Looking at other records, though, it just doesn't seem to pick up quieter sounds too well.
So, shouting? XD
P.S.
Does Audacity measure decibells or volume? Becuase we could have an average sound level we were aiming for and we could try and get it to that before sending it to you.
Your audio was very quiet and tinny from the start. If it's a result of solely your microphone, it's essentially broken.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileYodariquo said:It uses decibels, but basically it's a matter of as loud as you can, without it overloading. DC offset will just be a component of the microphone and that's something normalizing will take care off (not even a big deal anyway).
Your audio was very quiet and tinny from the start. If it's a result of solely your microphone, it's essentially broken.
I'll have to try normalising and shouting then and see what happens!
Edit: on audacity I can't raise the microphone input level about 0.0. :/ If I raise it to 1.0 it just goes back to 0.0 again.
Edit2: now I can miraculously change it but it doesn't seem to make any difference.
So I'll try normalising the next podcast and if that doesn't help buy a new mic?
Listened to the last one, good stuff.
Steel, stop staring at your balls and go get Metroid. Super Metroid is an untold amount of brilliance.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile