"What's Taking So Long?" & What Should Come Out First?

No one has asked what's taking so long, which I appreciate. But I also recognize at this point in the month, at least one of my usual audios would have gone out by now.

Well for one, my headphones broke.

It's not too severe of a break. The right ear fell out of place but is still connected to a wire, and could probably be put back in easily. I'll certainly fix it. But I saw it as an opportunity. With these headphones, I was able to edit for maybe 2 hours before the compression on my head and the ache in my ears got to be too much and I had to take a break, sometimes up to an hour. I got a more comfortable, if a little costly, headset - The Sennheiser HD599, which was rated highly in comfort, and I can attest to that. But they did have to ship... and unfortunately, they went on sale yesterday and I could have saved $50. Just my luck. They arrived on Sunday and so far I've been able to edit for 8 hours without the need for a break.

But with the downtime, I realized the need to speed up other parts of my workflow. The audio layouts for my next four audios are complete, but my way of finding farts in particular, which is often the bulk of an audio, has been inefficient. So I've spent the last day and a half listening to all the miscellaneous fart sounds in the archive I use for the farts with the best sound quality (relatively speaking. Unless it's movie sounds, you're rarely going to get ones that sound as good as the vocals you're using, especially with headphones as good as the Sennheiser HD599), and trying to name them. The English language lacks the adjectives necessary to describe some of these sounds, but I am doing my best. Past-Me will have curated them and named them appropriately, rather than "Farts_Wet_Clappy_Loud", a file that's 7 minutes of sounds thrown together.

When I cared less about quality and mixing sounds to be layered and distinctly my own, I could pump out a 4 minute audio (like Peach & Daisy) in a day. Now that same audio would take 4-5 days. I want to reach a similar level of speed without a major loss in quality. So I am also bundling my old sounds and touching them up to meet my current standards for re-use. However, the method I'm using is "Grouping", which means the sounds aren't flattened into a single file, but instead remain as the individual files used to mix them, and any sounds that do not fit the vocals can be swapped in and out. Think of these sounds like BIONICLE, where each set you buy can be swapped around to make something new, but they will always be shaped like a BIONICLE.

All of this is to say that I'm not making a lot of progress on specific audios, but there's really never going to be a good time to organize these files, and doing it now will speed things up significantly in the future as I no longer have to search through sounds until I find ones of good quality, or make new ones every single time. I HAD created a re-usable library, but phased it out because exporting those sounds as a single file wasn't flexible enough to match unique vocalizations.

If this all sounds like a lengthy and tedious process that will take weeks... it's not. I actually believe I can complete this process in just one to two 10 hour sessions. By this same time next week I hope to have one audio out and another deep into an edit. But for now, it's back to trying to determine whether a fart is "bubbly" or "wet".

Take care for now!