OSW Update (Apr 14) & Audio Prepping! (Patreon)

Hey brahs and brahs!

We recorded Ep71 (WM34) last night! it went amazing. Thought I'd give you a quick BTS (behind the scenes) of the setup and prepping files for audio editing:

Here's the setup from our end (*squeeze noise*). We're taping this in my old room in Dublin! Have a look at the dots:

(1) I'm recording our audio locally to a Zoom H6. 

(2) The silver YETAYYY mic is just so Maffew can hear us, and is plugged into the laptop running skype. (Maff's in Newcastle with another YETAY, recording himself locally). By locally I mean we're talking over skype, but recording ourselves individually (in much higher quality) which I'll mix later.

(3) The white cable plugged into the laptop is a headphone splitter - myself and V1 wear one earbud to hear Maffew (not two because myself and V1 need to talk to each other!). If we didn't use headphones, Maffew's audio would come through the laptop speakers, which our microphones would pick him up. 

The blu-ray cases under the mic stands lessen any noise picked up when we hit the table. I don't know of a non-ghetto way to do this!

Here's Jay, V1 and Maff's audio tracks:(I've pre-lowered Maff's volume to match ours you can see the wav doesn't reach the top and bottom in his)

But everyone's audio need to be sweetened before editing!Since myself & V1 were in the same room, there's no need to fix syncing, so I mixed us together in AUPHONIC, which is a fantastic online mixer/ compressor/ levelator/ noise-removal service. 

With Maffew it's a little more difficult. I sync'd his track to ours, then removed some fan noise (the white box below), and made his volume nice and smooth with THE LEVELATOR (an amazing free program, black box below. Maff listened to us via a quiet laptop speaker, but his mic still managed to pick us up! Auphonic made it worse, but Levelator did a great job in this case.

^^ The pic shows the noise removal sample (which I took from a quiet part of Maff's audio) and also what the Levelator looks like in action (the black box)

So here's what the mix without levelling looks like:(Left channel Jay/V1, Right channel Maffew)

And here's what the sweetened mix looks like:

^^^ Massive blocks, eh! Whilst music sounds better with a high dynamic range (peaks and troughs), podcasts sound better with a consistent volume. 

^^^ Yes! That's right, we recorded for 4 HOURS 20 MINUTES! Now I'll chop them up into individual segments (intro, matches, aftermath etc) and edit them 3-4 times over until I'm happy it's the tightest and flows well. Then i'll mix it to mono and it's time for video editing! 

^^^ Everything cut up into segments! Besides divvying up the workload into manageable parts, I can see which bits run too long.

The finished audio takes 5 full days to complete and will be somewhere between 90-120 minutes. My goal is to cut out 50-60% of the audio and still keep 90% of the opinions. It's a great value trade-off. Sometimes we repeat ourselves, have similar thoughts, or go severely off topic! Plus watching video, if something drags, it's felt more than in just audio, because video is a much more engaging/attention-needing medium.

Anywoo! Hope you enjoyed see this. Over the next week I'm finishing audio editing Ep72 and then doing this (Ep 71, WM34). When the audio is finished we'll be working on bars and NU cards!See ya in the funny pages!Jay