Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Mastering the Podcast

So, I am in the process of finalizing episode 1 of _Boats of the Glen Carrig_. It should accelerate a bit as much of the material is intro and outro and will be reused in each episode. I've got five chapters read, out of seventeen, a great trove of music from darkwinter.com, and a small cache of sound effects from wanderingear.com, so I'm just about ready to launch this puppy.

I found a solution for mixing the background music on the fly. Using a RAM disk for all the source files didn't really prevent glitches in the master recording. The problem seemed to be the destination drive, although I'm not sure what it is doing that would defeat write-caching and result in the loss of a half-second or more of audio. Maybe the caching is configurable somehow? Anyway, if I use the RAM disk for the source files and an external FireWire drive for the mixed file, all goes smoothly. It would go a little bit more smoothly if I had a control surface with sliders and a pause button that I could configure for the different audio sources, but the project budget doesn't allow that right now, and I'm not certain if DSP Quattro supports such a thing.

I'm excited about the new _Boats_ podcast. If I had to describe it in a few words, I would choose "ambient horror!" I hope someone besides me will enjoy it too!

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