Audacity is great. I've been using it to layer the instrumental music under the dialogue. It's exactly what I need: a multi-track mixing and editing program that's easy to understand and use. I tried that program Deck, which seems to be aimed at pros, and I couldn't make head or tails of it. I found Audacity much more intuitive for what I need to do. Which isn't much: layer multiple tracks, insert silence, adjust the volume of an entire track or a portion of one, and fade in and out where the volume changes. There are dozens of other options listed in the menus, most of which I don't even know what they mean. And don't care really; the program is doing what I want.
On Thursday I listened to several episodes of my clients' radio show and payed attention to the editing. I was rather surprised to discover that they have tons of "um"s and false starts in their interviews. Tons of them. I was wondering if I was going about this all the wrong way, since they were the ones who told me "the more the better" as far as editing goes, and I have been following their advice. Then I remembered that most of their interviews are live, so of course it's going to sound looser than something prerecorded.
I did have Georg listen to what I had done, and he assured me that it sounded conversational, not overedited. I am taking his word for it and sticking with what I've got. Although today, I ended up adding one "um" back in. It had been a hard one to remove, the way the words ran together, and listening to it again I realized that I hadn't done a good job of it. There wasn't a pop but it sounded weird, you could tell something had been done to it. I think an "um" here and there is better than making it sound choppy.
And there was one other place where I had misspoken and I really, really wanted to clean it up, but couldn't. Again, the words just ran together so much that I couldn't separate them without it sounding really strange. I even tried rerecording that sentence (I think that's called "looping"?) but it didn't work, when I pasted it in my voice sounded totally different. I didn't want it to be like the TV shows where it's so painfully obvious when someone is speaking live and when they've been rerecorded later (ANTM is particularly bad about this) so I left it as is. Again I think an honest slip of the tongue, while awkward, is going to sound better than something that was obviously faked.
I finished editing the talksets last night, and I'm about 2/3 done with the music. It's been fun to search out the instrumentals to go with each talkset. Normally on the air I just pick an instrumental CD, and use it for every talkset that day. This takes much more time, and I wouldn't want to do it for a live show. But it's nice to have the chance to think about what tunes will sound good with and be meaningfully related to what's being discussed.
Just now I took a break for about an hour, a half-hour of which was a nap. Which I greatly enjoyed, and greatly needed. This being a new skill I'm just learning, and not really knowing what I'm doing, I'm finding it very tiring. It takes more energy than I would have expected (if I had thought about it, which I did not) to concentrate this closely for long stretches of time. I guess I'm not used to listening so intently.
oh man, sarah. i've started voice-tracking at work... a few hours here and there, when i need to be two places at once. i'll pre-record 6 or 8 talk sets for air at a later time.
it is SO HARD. primarily because it's so difficult to resist the temptation to make the recording "better" than it would have naturally sounded live. when i flub up a sentence during a recording, i have a tendency to delete that track and start all over again. the result is that in the recordings i sound less like myself. isn't that odd?
so i've been training myself to just hit record, say what i normally would, save the file and move on. if i stumble, stutter or add an "um", unless an obvious and flagrant error, i just let it go.
it's the most difficult thing about this job so far.
The one that I really really wanted to fix was the beginning of the last talkset. I was trying to say "We've come to the end of another Divaville Lounge" and I said "We've come to an end--the end of ..." All told I spent almost an hour trying to fix that one half-second flub!
I did successfully loop another, bigger flub earlier in the show. But this one, I don't know, I just couldn't make my voice sound the same.
One of the advantages of the "This American Life" approach--interlapping layers of narrative and documentary--is that if a sentence comes out badly in the documentary portion, you can move a paraphrase to the narration.