Trigger Warning: Hot Dog Story, Audio Geekery, Code Geekery
In one form or another, I have been asked what goes into the process of pulling clips from TBTL and posting them on to Marsupial Gurgle. I decided to use TBTL #2107 as the episode to document and highlight the process in a bit more detail.
Obviously, the first thing that goes into pulling clips for a show is to download the show when it gets published and open the audio file in my audio editor of choice, Audacity. As for the reason for choosing Audacity… well, it is free and available on both Windows and Mac (the latter being the primary platform that I now use). Although I have access to Adobe Audition CC by way of a Creative Cloud subscription, I found that it ends up being too much for the work I need to do.
As I listen through the show, if I run across an interesting bit, I will select the region before and after the clip, copy, and paste it into a new file:
With the clip in a new file, I start to trim away bits to isolate the specific clip that I want and do a fade in at the beginning, and a fade out at the end. I try to keep a padding (silence) of at least 0.040s before and after fade in and fade out (this used to be closer to 0.025s, but it was increased to provide for a cleaner start and end). I will sometimes fiddle with the actual amount of padding to get the clip have a total length that gets rounded up to the nearest 0.25s. Why? I suppose it’s to appease one of my OCD attributes.Continue reading“Hot Dog Story: What Goes Into Pulling Clips From TBTL to Post to Marsupial Gurgle”