Strange Horizons Podcast: I Have Placed My Sickness Upon You

Have you ever heard me tell a funny story about a goat?  You have now.

Funny story about the podcast, but not this week’s.  I’ve gotten feedback on several of the podcasts that the volume in general was okay, but the ends of sentences or whatnot taper off into too quiet.  “I think you’re turning your head away from the mic or something,” the people suggest.  “Your volume really needs to stay even.”  I can’t argue with the latter, but if I’m turning my head away from the mic, the movement is really subtle.  Still, I’m on a mission to be the very most badass podcaster out there, which means solving this problem in a major way.

This has led to a series of increasingly hilarious recording techniques.  It started with my hugging the mic so that I was as close to it as possible while still having sight lines open to the thing I’m reading.  That didn’t cut it.  So then I switched from sitting at my desk to standing next to it.  Then to recording in my bedroom, where, it turns out, the acoustics are much nicer. Apparently all those books eat the obnoxious buzz that creeps up when I amplify the mic too much.  This was better, but still no cigar.  I tried a headset mic.  This was worse by several orders of magnitude.  (It may have solved the volume inconsistency, but everything else is massively abysmal.)

In the process of trying to fix the disaster that was the recording with the headset mic, I wound up learning a lot about the sound editing software I’m using.  For example, there’s a setting labelled, “Normalize volume.”

Let’s look at that again: Normalize. Volume.

Gee.  I wonder whether that might not be useful.

Ladies and gentlemen, this week’s podcast has had the volume normalized.    Plus, a funny goat.