Soft Reset

Hello there all. As you may have noticed, I have not posted in a while. Let me first assure the six of you reading this that I am indeed alive and well. The podcast on the other hand... not so much. Not for the moment anyways.

First of all, problems that only pop up when you first start doing something like this ... well, they popped up. Things like figuring out which recording software to use (I'll be bringing this up again in a little bit), what mike setups work and don't work, actually editing the damn thing.

No joke, Episode 1 became a Phantom Menace (haha, see what I did there?). After spending four and a half hours clearing out all the Umms and Uhhs out, the save file doesn't save properly, and cleared itself out. Considering we wanted the first Podcast up on Cananda Day, and I started editing on the Tuesday before, that added a little bit of over-stress to yours truly.

Episode 1 on its own was interesting all on its own. For one, we were using a One Mic setup. Passing a Rock Band USB Mic back and forth while trying to make things sound conversational, natural, and above all else, Interesting, that wasn't much fun. We were using Audacity, which while being easy to use didn't allow us to use two USB Mic's... or at least, not how we had things plugged in.

Episode 1 had a Second Take. The second take sounded more nautral, and ended up sounding a lot better. The problem was, we switched recording software. This time we used Kristal. While it allowed us to use two USB Mics, there was a time sync issue, which not only had us talking over each other, but cut out random parts of word and sentences, rendering the effort useless.

After posting Episode One, Jeff and I started trying to work out the kinks. We got some ideas together, and Episode Two looked to have a bit more direction. A LOT more direction. It wasn't going to just be about us talking about ourselves, we were going to give our Podcast some feeling, some personality. We got some topics together, and started recording, again, using Kristal since it was the only one that allowed us to use two mics and try to sound natural.

Episode two, I will admit, was our best outing so far. We still ramble a little bit, but lets face it, that's who we are. There's no denying or escaping it, when you have two guys in a room who are passionate about games, and have opinions about games, you're going to get sidetracked a bit. BUT, it never ended up being so off-topic as to render things random. Episode two would have been an excellent showcase of what was to come.

Alas, past tense.

Once again, thanks to a slight delay during the recording, our voices intermingled too much. Not as bad as E1 Take 2, but bad enough to again render things unusable.

Currently, the setup is one mic on a stand, with us sitting relatively close together, talking into said mic. Not as comfortable as a two mic setup, but the sound is good, and we're raring to go. Episode 2 Take 2... then take 3... 7.... 14. The harder we tried to make things sound as good as our first run of Episode 2, things spiraled downward. Either it wasn't as interesting, we veered off track too much, it just wasn't the same. It just didn't have the same feeling that our first take had.

So, where do we go from here?

We're taking a break from the podcast phase. It was harder than we expected, and we tried to go too fast before really preparing ourselves. So, a soft reset. A return to Title Screen if you will. Jeff and I will be posting regularly here instead of trying to push out a podcast, while still planning and practicing the recording process. I assure you, the new Episode 2 will be much better than it was before. For now, I'm going to quote a famous poet, a gentleman and a scholer, a man by the name of Frosty. For as it pertains to our podcast...

"I'll say goodbye, but don't you cry, I'll be back again someday".

... Alright, so he wasn't much of a poet, and yes, Mick Foley the pro wrestler did exactly the same thing when leaving his position (albeit short term wise anyways...), but still, the point still stands.

Thanks for reading that longer-than-normal post. The next ones will be Gaming related, I assure you.