The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson – Read by Wayne June

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The incomparably awesome-voiced narrator, Wayne June, has completed a terrific sounding narration of William Hope Hodgson‘s The House On The Borderland. This is the famous supernatural horror novel, from 1908, that H.P. Lovecraft described as “A classic of the first water” – I looked that phrase up – “of the first water” means means “of the highest quality.”

When you combine the wonder of Wayne June’s narrative powers with a classic of this magnitude you’re bound to get something special.

And he’s selling it for just $10 HERE.

The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

The book comes in five MP3s. But, and this is a pretty interesting experiment, Wayne June is also giving away the entire novel there, on the site, in a streaming format!

Yup, if you want to listen to the novel streaming you can hear the whole thing FREE!

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Audacity To Podcast: TAP065: Audacity Compressor Showdown

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Audacity To PodcastThe Audacity To Podcast is a podcast about the freeware program Audacity. We use Audacity to edit The SFFaudio Podcast. It’s wonderful and it’s free. Back in January, in episode TAP065: Audacity Compressor Showdown the host, Daniel J. Lewis took several podcaster’s recordings and ran them through various compression software programs – it’s pretty technical – but the results seem to be pretty conclusive – if you’re not getting paid by the hour to edit audio and you want to make your podcast sound nice and loud Levelator is what you want to use. Here’s the conclusion Lewis makes:

Surprisingly, Levelator did a consistently fantastic job on the audio and handled background noise well. It gives no controls and may add an extra step if you don’t record into WAV or AIFF. But it’s easy (albeit slow) and very effective.

Here’s the |MP3|, and HERE‘s the informative post (with all the samples you can play with).

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheAudacitytoPodcast

Posted by Jesse Willis

The effect of Levelator on a low volume podcast (SPOILER: it’s striking!)

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Here’s a rather striking visualization of the difference the use of Levelator makes. The podcast name has been blurred so as to not prompt any more threats of physical violence (humorously intended or otherwise).

The volume difference between an original podcast and a levelated version of it

On the left we see an original podcast, with a volume so low that you can’t hear it wearing earbuds (in a noisy environment) on the right is the levelated file, showing the effect that Levelator has.

I’ve just made a donation to Levelator in the amount of $10.00.

Levelator donation of $10.00

Just think about that, if poor poverty stricken Jesse gave Levelator $10.00 from his coffee fund it must be absolutely wonderful!

It is. Get Levelator, it’s free and it makes quiet podcasts loud.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Volume problems on podcasts, a comparison of two podcasts I listened to today

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Geeks Guide To The GalaxySearch Engine with Jesse BrownDavid Barr Kirtley, who puts together and hosts Geeks Guide To Galaxy is responding to my complaint about his podcast being too low in volume.

But his show isn’t the only one I’ve had this issue with. Our most recent podcast, #155, also featured two out of three of us complaining about the volume of the Clarkesworld podcast.

I’ve also complained, by email, to Tevi Troy of New Books In Public Policy about the same issue.

Most podcasts are ok for volume. But there are some that are consistently low.

But to get a sense of what I mean I’ll use the two latest shows as my example.

So, picking on David Barr Kirtley again, I listened to Geeks Guide To Galaxy on my walk home from work today (the episode with Morgan Spurlock) – I could barely hear it at maximum volume. It was raining and there were cars on the roadway and because I wasn’t in front of my amplified speaker system at home I just couldn’t hear everything that was being said, and to make it worse to hear anything I had to jam my earbuds down my ear canals. A podcast should physically hurt me.

Here’s the Geeks Guide To Galaxy file: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide57.mp3

Now, compare that experience to the one on my way in to work today. I listened to TVO’s Search Engine. And right away I had my iPhone set to half volume of full, and at that it was plenty loud, loud enough, in fact, so that even set at half volume and with my earbuds hanging loosely over my ears, I could hear everything.

Here’s the Search Engine file: http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvo/searchengine/~3/mZBN588091g/801144_48k.mp3

And, incidentally, at home now in another comparison I’ve just made again, I can hear Search Engine from across the room at 3/4 volume through my iPhone speaker. The Geek’s Guide is at full volume and is not loud enough.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: Beside Still Waters by Robert Sheckley

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Robert Sheckley was a joker, a satirist, a poker of fun at all of the silliness in life. But there’s something more going on in this short short story from 1953. Sure there’s the existentialist angle, and of course there’s the requisite Sheckley humor, but it’s the other quality in Beside Still Waters that makes this Sheckley story a bit different. You can see it right there in the title (taken from Psalm 23 of the Hebrew Bible), and you can see it in the Virgil Finlay’s illustration for the story too:

Beside Still Waters by Robert Sheckley - Illustration by Virgil Finlay

Beside Still Waters is an elegiac tale, offering only a cup of sadness to the reader, it’s the sort of story that Clifford D. Simak might have written. And that should be recommendation enough.

LibriVoxBeside Still Waters
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Frank Malanga
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 28, 2010
When people talk about getting away from it all, they are usually thinking about our great open spaces out west. But to science fiction writers, that would be practically in the heart of Times Square. When a man of the future wants solitude he picks a slab of rock floating in space four light years east of Andromeda. Here is a gentle little story about a man who sought the solitude of such a location. And who did he take along for company? None other than Charles the Robot. First published in Amazing Stories Oct.-Nov. 1953.
|ETEXT|

And here’s the |PDF| I made from the original magazine publication.

Posted by Jesse Willis