While it didn’t last very long, the podcast I did with my friends taught me a lot of things about audio recording. I did take a recording arts class once. But being able to put some of the knowledge to use was interesting. Much of what I learned about had to be re-learned again, due to brain atrophy. So what went wrong with the podcast?

A good portion of the podcast going under was just the amount of sheer edits and fixes I had to apply to the waveform. My cohorts know about this, and I had plenty of crap to fix when we were done recording. I don’t have the best setup and equipment. It was sufficient to get a nice sound to my computer, but not enough to maintain the quality. Distance from the mics, no pop-guards, one complete boom-stand, a short stick to hold my mic, and inadequate spacing plus terrible layout of my room didn’t help.

It’s a bit of a ragequit as well. I didn’t like the current content of the podcast. Even if I said we’d include derails and trainwrecks, listening to the unedited podcasts made me realize that more often than not, we talk like complete idiots. Maybe we got better in the last three, but I have my doubts.

Despite this rant, I wouldn’t abandon podcasting. I’ve found it fun. Perhaps I just need a reboot and a refocus of energy.

So what should a reader get out of reading this entry? A good podcast takes effort. It takes professionalism. A bit of garage mentality. Unpolished, but beautifully uncut.

It should be YOU. Not being someone else, but being yourself. And unfortunately, I was fooling myself.

I failed this time. Now it’s time to go fail, again. But I’m going to fail better. Because I know how to do it. (The failing part.)

Miku image drawn by nagian (http://yoroz.jp/), stolen from danbooru.

-maserbeam

It’s not fair to make silly excuses for not showing up routinely with something that’s supposed be made weekly. For us, it’s been our podcast. If I can’t produce a podcast for one week, I usually just wait until next production week and make up for it with content. No excuses made. Besides, this is all in good fun.

But goddamit. Just a few minutes ago while editing the audio file in Audacity Beta 1.3.2, it crashes hard on me after a simple edit. In my case it was deleting less than a second of noise. Audacity crashes on me and loses all of my progress. I boot the software back up with hopes of trying to salvage. It pops up a dialogue box that says I can try to recover the progress that it supposedly could bring back. When I click on the button to recover the data, the dialogue disappears and nothing happens.

“Isn’t there supposed to be two tracks with my audio?”
Read the rest of this entry »

-maserbeam

As some people already know, there was a small blurb of the second season of K-ON!. Our wonderful little moe blob show shall continue. But some of us could swear it already started. A-1 Pictures has graced us with a new show called Sora no Woto, which I’ll call K-ON! version 1.5 for now.

It’s got 5 girls and it’s a show about music (kinda). So it’s K-ON!.

Joking aside, this show does have an uncanny resemblance to the art of Kyoto Animation’s recent works. It’s been said in the podcasts as well. But will you really succumb to the frothing-at-the-mouth mob of angry animu fans who say that “shit show is shit”? Anyone who has a professional eye could see that the literal animation is different from KyoAni’s style. If you ask me, it looks closer to the animation of Kannagi and Canaan in terms of character deformation between the frames. Less wonky, but more lanky. Ah hell, you don’t even need a professional eye. But you would do best without the notion that you’ll hate this show, simply because someone else hated an entirely different show. I’ll address this in the upcoming podcast next week, so be sure to listen to that.

I really have no qualms with the show. Then again, I have a high resistance to the anonymous retards in the internet anime community, so I rarely talk shit about a show without at least having seen one episode. As an internet person, sometimes I also partake in the “hate it because it’s all for the fun of it” kinda thing. But sometimes the zealots out on the interwebs would indicate otherwise. Serious business.

-maserbeam

The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, or Vanishment for those who like ANN.com, is coming our way, after the post-trauma effects left over from the Endless Eight arc we were subjected to in the 2009 Haruhi run. It’s all fine and dandy, but the estranged opinion of everyone was that character designs ever since K-ON! simply went to shit. It’s quite a strong sentiment. I didn’t do any research but it already seems like all it needed was a seeded thought of “suckage” and everyone went with it. Primarily, this has to do with popular opinion about the character designs of Kyoto Animation; I’d like to think it started earlier with Lucky Star. Read the rest of this entry »

-maserbeam