Shell Interlude 1

Narrator: Lyre
Original Chapter

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14 Responses to Shell Interlude 1

  1. Rafinius says:

    Not to be mean but the microphone quality severely detracts from the listening experience. Many people listen to audio books so they can do something else simultaneously. Here one has to concentrate to understand everything.

    I made this reddit post (http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2ie2yq/a_small_group_of_people_started_making_an_audio/) on a subreddit that has several Worm fans and someone expressed a similar attitude regarding the first few chapters, although I think they still had a better sound quality than this one. People are spoiled when it comes to sound quality.

    • Rafinius says:

      Can’t edit.

      Maybe you should do that sound enhancing thing before you upload anything here instead of doing it only after on the youtube compilation.

      • Rein says:

        Oh I do it for every chapter now, and I recommend that all other readers do the same. The only reason there was a difference between that youtube compilation and the chapters on here was because I hadn’t discovered the technique until that point. When I get some time (after I’ve redone Bakuda’s voice) I’ll go back and do a quick edit pass for all those old chapters.

        • Rafinius says:

          You mean you do it for all chapters read by you or all chapters read by anyone?

          • Rein says:

            I do it for all chapters read by me and all Interlude chapters. I’ve suggested everyone else do it and have instructions posted on the private page, so at that point it’s up to them.

    • Rein says:

      Thanks for helping to spread the word! This chapter was the first time this reader had done any voice recording so it wasn’t so much an issue of a bad mic (I believe she’s using a fairly good gaming headset) but of inexperience. I found the chapter to be pretty understandable, but I did note that she needs to speak louder to help make her voice more clear.

      • Rafinius says:

        You can clearly hear sound distortions. A bzzz bzzz accompanying every word. Almost like an involuntary mini-Bakuda effect. It is especially strong if you turn the volume up and use headphones.

        Other than that and some emotional inflections that are pretty much missing the reading seemed fine.

        • Rein says:

          Hmm, I’m not hearing the buzzing sound (listening on headphones at work). I do notice a bit of a static hiss with each word, but that can be avoided in the future by speaking louder when recording and probably moving the mic an inch or two farther away as well.

  2. Rafinius says:

    One more minor nitpick. Even though its all from Kayden’s viewpoint there should be more of a differentiation between her thoughts and the actual lines she says out loud. There were a few points where one couldn’t be sure if she didn’t actually say these things to Max.

    • Rein says:

      I’ve found that this is actually quite hard to do and really requires you to get into the character, and even then I’m not sure how well I’ve pulled it off. If you know of some examples of other people doing it I would really love to hear what they do.

      • Rafinius says:

        You actually do it really well with Taylor. Everything that isn’t actual spoken word is a bit more subdued. But yes, getting in character is a must. Pretty much the plain text is just narrating with sometimes some emphasis for tension/emotional scenes while her speech is as if you were there and actually said that stuff to whoever she’s talking to.

      • Senjiu says:

        Eneasz Brodski, who recorded the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality audiobook does it really well.

        http://www.hpmorpodcast.com/

        I still have the old episodes where he did Harry, Petunia, Michael and Minerva himself, before a bunch of volunteers showed up and sent him their voices for the characters and contrary to what he said I think he did that quite well.
        He still does Harry, Quirrel and Draco for all the episodes and it’s easy to distinguish them, even if it wasn’t so from the context.

  3. Dareno says:

    The narration is good, but at least when listening on headphones the sound quality is still poor. It appears that the poor sound quality of the interlude is related to a low encoding bitrate. Is there maybe still a non-compressed or less compressed copy of the recoding? I think it should still be possible to get a better quality out of it, as long as there is such a copy.

    • Rein says:

      Hmm, you know that’s a good point. It does sound like an encoding issue. It says in our instructions to use 56 kbps, however they may not have or for some reason may need it to be higher. I’ll look into it and hopefully we can get a better copy.

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