You don’t need professional editing services editing/audio production is not difficult and you may just need to watch a few youtube videos about it (it’s more time-consuming than difficult tbh )
I thought the latest podcast was great and a must listen as both José and Chris were on it, but unfortunately I had to listen to it (and previous episodes) on a small bluetooth speaker as I did not want to risk damaging my main speakers or headphones.
Some tips:
Ideally all participants should use proper microphones (something like the Yeti or Snowball)
Use a pop filter (you can even make these out of an older metal clothes hanger and tights!)
Sound check! Set gain levels so that talking does not go into the red (distortion)
When editing, normalise tracks so they are equal and also deal with any clipping or other irregularities
Thanks for the tips. We all have some good mics and pop-filters. We even bought new mics after starting. Two of us have Audio-Technica ATR2100 mics that are used all the time in professional settings. I set my levels each time, and run all tracks through normalizing and clip filtering. I’m using audacity. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Are there any plugins that you know that would do this better that? We are trying to get better, and it isn’t always the same host doing the editing. If you know of some useful resources that we can use that would be most helpful.
I usually listen in my car, so I don’t notice the speaker issue as it doesn’t seem that bad in there. I’m not sure why it is okay there. Maybe my care tries to normalize the sound.
Ah nice re the mics - I might give it a go on my speakers again then
With regards to software, I would probably use a DAW, something like Logic Pro or even GarageBand (which I believe is free now) as these will enable you to lay out separate tracks for each person, as well as for intros, sound effects etc. This will allow you to control them independently while also master the whole track together.
This is what we do now . I think the issue right now is that its not always the same person doing the edit. We trade back and forth depending on who has time. We’re working on making that process more consistent going forward.
Yeah, I didn’t notice until about halfway through, but it was pretty excruciating It made Anna sound insane for taking forever to respond and then laughing randomly and Chris and José sound rude for talking over her before she finished speaking.
I would say it was more like between 5-10 seconds off, though.
Based on everyone’s feedback, Anna spent the past several days re-cutting and re-balancing the audio. I’ve just uploaded a new audio file in case anyone is interested. To add some context to this there were some technical issues that happened during that episode that made it exceptionally hard to cut together. On top of that trying to wrangle 5 different audio tracks, each with their own issues is no small feat and is a pretty laborious process.
A little inside baseball on our process. We typically record on Thursdays and (attempt to) release a show by Monday morning. Given that this is something we’re doing in our spare time, a 3 day turn-around has been, aggressive to say the least. In order to give us some extra time for editing and mastering we’re going to start releasing on Thursday morning. We’re hoping that the extra time to edit will lower our overall stress levels and help improve quality.
At the end of the day, we’re programmers and not professional audio folks. I can’t promise that our overall audio quality is always going to be as high as some people are going to want it. But we’ll do our best.
In the end we do this show because its fun. Our call is one of the highlights of my week. We don’t make any money, we don’t have any intention of doing ads, etc. We just really like talking to each other and talking about elixir. I hope that excitement and earnest-ness comes through despite any foibles with our editing and mixing.
Thanks for all the feedback. Let us know what we can keep working on .
Thanks Chris for the insight on those. They overlap a lot with the criticism I hear too. I will just provide a bit of info on how I deal with two of those:
To me it is an apples to oranges comparison. If you are considering gRPC, it is likely because you are building a heterogenous systems, so you would want to integrate Elixir/Erlang with this system using something agnostic (as gRPC itself) and not the Erlang distribution. But you are correct, it just kills one of the marketing bullets.
They actually fully complement each other. To me, Elixir/Erlang shines when building homogenous systems over multiple nodes, such as Phoenix.Presence (we talked about this in another thread too). There is just a huge amount of overhead to build those systems in other technologies and it is really straightforward in Elixir/Erlang.
So I frame this as: in the worst case scenario, Elixir/Erlang will be as good/as bad as your current programming languages + the concurrency model. But if you are building a system that is homogenous and may spawn over multiple nodes, then it sets itself apart and complements really nicely with the existing orchestration tooling.
Shameless promo: we discuss those in the Adopting Elixir book too.
It amazes me that we have been doing this for more than a year now. Thank you to everyone who has been supportive and given us feedback. We will have some swag at ElixirConf and at GigCity Elixir. I hope to see you all there. Don’t hesitate to say, “hello.” Last year someone friended me on facebook before meeting me.
Most of my effort in ex_cldr and friends was to remove reliance on global configuration for this very reason. Most of the package is about data manipulation and it relies heavily on compile time code and data generation - that is hosted in user-define modules (following the Ecto.Repo model).
A more recent example is the new version of ex_cldr_date_times where the generalised functions all take config as a parameter. But you can also materialise one or more Cldr.Calendar modules that bakes in the configuration at compile time.
editing/audio production is not difficult and you may just need to watch a few youtube videos about it 
(it’s more time-consuming than difficult tbh 
)
. I think the issue right now is that its not always the same person doing the edit. We trade back and forth depending on who has time. We’re working on making that process more consistent going forward.
It made Anna sound insane for taking forever to respond and then laughing randomly and Chris and José sound rude for talking over her before she finished speaking. 
.
