Auralphonic Episode 9: Music and Sound Effects

Auralphonic Episode 9: Music and Sound Effects. Dated: August 2015.

Music: Not everyone’s a fan of intro/outro music clips because music taste can come into play, but some podficcers like to use music that’s been indicated by the author in their notes. It mostly overlaps with atmospheric notes and some scene break bits, but it also depends on the fandom (Bandom has quite a bit of songfic, and for those who don’t want to sing, it’s easier to add a snippet of music).

Atmospheric examples fit with basic background noises, a sound effect on an elf’s voice that fits the textual description, violin music included in a Sherlock piece where he plays violin music, and so on. It does help, but some people still don’t do these because they started out not doing so. (Early music and sound effect examples also had some volume and talk over issues, so some internalized not wanting to interfere with understanding what’s being said. As more people have gotten experience and the editing skills have gotten better, attitudes have softened from being Anti-Music Included.)

Common uses of sound effects: Clarity around scene breaks, flashbacks (Gverb example played, but Audacity has changed their settings, so YMMV), text messages (message ping), epistolary (a different sound effect for letters, emails, etc.), sound effect to indicate footnote (I’m not sure about the example, tbh). Some people use distinct sound effects for these purposes, but some use a little clip of music for certain usages (like scene breaks).

Free Sound Effects: https://freesound.org/

(On that epistolary example: Some people don’t want to cut out what’s written on the page, but some people don’t want to listen to (f’ex in emails) “To Such-and-such. From So-and-so” because you can skip that when reading, in a manner of speaking. Some people extend this to text message info or an example played that included code that would be mentally skipped.)

Auralphonic Episode 20: Posting Tips

Auralphonic Episode 20: Posting Tips. Dated: July 2016.

Talkback for the previous episode (GarageBand tips and tricks) mentions that there are other sound editing programs than Audacity and GarageBand. It is noteworthy that a lot of podficcing tips are aimed at free options, though, so some sound editing programs don’t catch on for people who have to buy programs separate from work (or other) purposes.

I’m not sure why there’s so much about spreadsheets and Excel, tbh. It sounds like they keep all that info I put in “Top Matter” sections there. I can admit that keeping track of cross-posting across platforms and multi-voice would be helpful for some podficcers.

In response to a question from a Twitter person, there are different attitudes to multi-chapter works-in-progress. Some will not listen to a WIP whatsoever, and some feel differently if the original work is a WIP (such as uploading a new chapter as each one comes out). On the podficcer end, some people don’t want to wait until a long fic is done to upload everything (f’ex, it’s not unreasonable for someone to want encouragement and smaller steps while working on a +100K fic that might take months, over a year, etc.). So, you do you.

For multi-chapter fics, there are different preferences for posting chapter by chapter (multiple files) vs “Entire work” (one file). Some people don’t want to download a ton of files. One host gave an example of offering individual chapters as MP3 files and a M4_ file with all of the chapters. Another one talked about an audiobook program (Chapter and Verse; for iPod, iTunes, and QuickTime on Windows) where they can have each chapter file literally be its own chapter. [M4A is for music on Apple/iTunes, and M4B is specifically for audiobooks.]