Got Peak installed last night. It's much more powerful than the other program I was using, with a learning curve to match. I spent over an hour reading the manual last night, and I'm not typically a manual-reading person. After reading the manual I got the second audio segment edited. I also found out that Peak does not handle multiple tracks. The same company makes another program, Deck, to do that.
Deck is set up to look just like a mixing board. Which would be great, if I had ever used a mixing board before. I'm going to poke around online and see if there's anything else which will do what I need and might be a little easier to work with.
Several years ago I heard a segment on This American Life about how they prepare the show. They said most listeners would be surprised by how much editing they do: not just the obvious things like cleaning up the "ums" and false starts, but even lengthening or shortening every pause to maximize the impact of each word. I've been listening to back episodes of TAL and trying to hear the editing. One interesting discovery: they don't actually remove all the "ums," false starts and repeated words. Mostly they do strip them out. But they leave them in when the speaker is excited or, more surprisingly, when the speaker is not overwrought but is talking about something emotionally important. They seem to have highlighted the key moments by leaving in the "um"s. It's interesting that a bit of linguistic sloppiness is used to convey emotional intensity.
Tonight I had grand plans to get straight to work on the audio and get at least 2 segments done. Then Thirteen struck. She's been growing more and more difficult on the car trip to and from the vet. Whining, loudly, the whole way. She usually rides on the floor, and this time I thought sitting on the seat might make her feel better and not whine so much. Alas, it backfired. She still whined constantly, but now she was sitting too far away for me to reach back and pet her, which temporarily stops the whining. And she's so nearly deaf that I can't calm her with my voice. Tonight she got so worked up that she barked for about the last five miles. Have you ever tried to drive a car with a dog barking in your ear, over and over? It's maddening. Earsplitting. I went from telling her to stop, to snapping at her to stop, to yelling at her to stop. Once or twice I think she might have heard me, but mostly all I accomplished was scaring poor Jane and worsening the headache I got from all the barking.
So much for my grand plan. I feel basically okay now, but not up to normal. The way I'm feeling now is called "every symptom of the headache except the pain in my head." Which may not make any sense at all, but I know what I mean. I'm going to give it a try and see if I'm up to working on the audio now. If concentrating on listening to audio clips turns out to be too much for my head, I'll go to bed early and try again tomorrow.
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