Pod Aware 2012 Day 1: How We Podfic

There are so many ways to create podfic and so many ways to listen. We might engage with podfic curled up in bed, in our closet, while commuting or at the gym, in our bathroom with makeshift soundproofing. To find out more information on podfic and how we podfic, check out Pod Aware on DW, LJ or Tumblr.

This is my first time participating in Pod Aware, as well as my first time ever making a podcast! So please forgive me if I sound a little stiff, it was deeply, deeply weird to be recording without a fic in front of me. ^^; I think my recording for Day 2 turned out a little better than this one, but hey, I am all about the learning curve.

Podcast Length: 6 min
Download options: mp3 format (2.4 MB) || m4b format (2.1 MB)

The Logitech stick microphone I reference in this podcast is pretty similar to this one; I put a folded bit of kleenex over the end of it to serve as a homemade pop screen. The programs that I reference using are Audacity, of course, and then also Gold Wave.


Here's a full transcript of the podcast:

 

Hello! This is regonym, and this is a podcast for the first day of Pod Aware 2012! The topic for Day 1 is How We Podfic, so my plan is to ramble a bit about how I go about recording and editing and generally, making something that people will hopefully want to listen to!

I’m curious to hear what everyone else will say on the topic, because everyone’s setups is a little bit different. And that’s part of what I’ve always liked about the podfic community is that there’s no wrong way to podfic, there’s just different ways.

First I’ll talk equipment. I’m a PC user, so I use Audacity for my recording and nearly all of my editing. I do my final noise removal in a separate program called Gold Wave, because it has this really nice ability to create very fine-tuned filters that I like. In terms of microphones, I have a cheap stick microphone that I use, by Logitech, that I picked up for $10 at Staples way back when when I was first getting started. I’ve experimented with using a headset mic before- I have one for Skyping that’s pretty nice – but I found it picked up my breathing and lip-smacky noises and stuff like that way too much for me to really be happy with the resulting sound quality. So, it’s been a stick mic for me, since the beginning.

And that’s equipment out of the way. Next there’s the general process that I go through when I record a story, and the first part of that is story selection. To give you a little info about me, I read a *lot* of fanfiction. Being a reader (and a lurker, mostly) has been the primary way I’ve interacted with fandom for about ten years now – I have pretty much zero talent for writing or drawing, so for the longest time I wasn’t really… participatory, I guess? I’d leave comments, and rec stories to friends, but that was about it. So when I discovered podfic about three years ago, it was kind of a revelation for me, because it was something I felt I could do, it was a way I could contribute. I think I might go into that a little bit more in the Podfic Fandom post I’m planning to make, because it’s a little off-track for today’s topic, so I’m going to try to concentrate more on the process aspect today.

But anyway, since I’ve been reading in fandom for pretty much forever, I know what stories click with me and what stories don’t. For me, I have to have some level of connection with a fic before I know it’ll be one that I can record successfully. It’s kind of a hard thing to put into words – I heard one way to describe it that inkjunket used that I really liked, which was calling it ‘pod farr’ - that feeling when you read a story and you’re going ‘yes, yes’  internally as you’re reading it, because you know it’s right for your voice and you know it’ll be fun to do.

I’ve amassed, as I’m sure many podficcers have, a folder full of fics that have passed this ‘pod farr’ test and are on my potential to-do list. When I decide I’m ready to try for a particular fic out of that list, that’s when I’ll contact the author for permission or check to see if they have blanket permission, or whatever. And that’s kind of my starting gun for the project - I try not to work on more than one podfic at once, because I’ve learned that multiple projects are kind of disastrous for me – I end up not finishing any of them and it just, it all ends in tears, it’s very bad.

I’ll start off usually by doing a re-read of the fic to get it in my head a bit more, and then I’ll set up to record! My set-up is to hook my stick mic up to my laptop, and read the fic off the laptop screen while I’m recording, and it works pretty well – my laptop fan will come on every now and again but it usually edits out just fine at the noise removal stage at the end of everything.

I have a tendency to try to avoid re-recording anything, because it’s a pain and it’s also really hard to get the sound quality to match, so when I’m going through a fic doing my readthrough I’ll usually do multiple takes of most lines, especially when it comes to dialogue, and that way, when I’m done recording and start editing, I have a range of potential options for any given line in the story.

There have been times I wish I could be a little less picky when it comes to that because this makes me very slowww. When I’m editing I do one pass to select which takes I like best out of the initial readthrough, and sort of Frankenstein-assemble the rough structure together. And then I do a second pass to get the pacing all right so the flow sounds natural again. And then I usually do a final listen while I’m comparing the recording to the text, to try to catch any places where I might have flipped words, or left something out, or made other mistakes like that. It’s usually only when I’m totally happy with it that I’ll then move on to amplifying the whole waveform and exporting it so I can do noise removal in Gold Wave.

                And once that’s all done, it comes time for the posting dance! I like to have a bunch of options available for people to download or stream, so I make both an mp3 and m4b/audiobook version, and I import them both into iTunes temporarily so I can add all the metadata and cover art and stuff like that. I usually make the cover art for my podfics at some point during the editing process, kind of alongside it – my skills in that don’t really extend beyond very far, I can pretty much just ‘add text to something and crop it’ but it’s worked pretty well for me so far, just to know that much. I’ve been helped out in the past by some very kind fanartists who’ve allowed me to use their art as the base for a few of my covers, which is always very nice of them.

                Anyways, after that’s all added I upload it, typically to Sendspace and also to Paraka’s website, which she has very graciously offered to many different podficcers as a place to host their files for streaming options – and once that’s all done I post it as an entry to Amplificathon! The other places I usually post are AO3, and then also my tumblr as well. And then as a final thing I always drop a note to the author of the fic, to let them know I’ve posted it in case they’re interested in checking it out or linking to it or whatever they want to do.

                And that’s about it, that’s the life cycle of a podfic for me. Hopefully this was interesting to listen to – if it wasn’t, I do apologize, and please enjoy the rest of Pod Aware! Bye!