In this episode the HPR Audiobook Club discusses the audiobook Blood Witness by David Hitt

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Non-Spoiler Thoughts

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• This book may or may not be offensive to some. We discuss.
• Audio quality was generally good, very few double reads.
• Thaj is annoyed by the transition sound.
• We generally enjoyed the theme music.
• We discuss the characters that we found the most interesting.
• Lyle apologizes for being unintentionally offensive.
• How do vampires work in this book anyways ?

Beverage Reviews

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As usual, the HPR AudioBook Club took some time to review the beverages that each of us were drinking during the episode

• Thaj: Water, and a bit of something different. Thaj has had a rough week so he treated himself to Daelmans Wafers
• x1101: Redhook Longhammer IPA
• pokey: Pokey’s beverage in this episode is Twisted Cabernet Savaugnon.
• FiftyOneFifty: Mike’s Hard Smashed Apple Ale

Things We talked about

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• Pokey thinks the ending is not strong.
• He also finds some plot holes.
• There is a big door for a sequel.
• The logistics of becoming a vampire.
• Why "Twilight" sucks.
• How the characters react to becoming a vampire.
• The book wasn’t as graphic as we anticipated.
• We introduce… OneFiftyOneFifty!
• Fire!!!
• Sparks vs. allsparks
• Link in the shownotes…or not.
• Do you need a "good person" to cheer on in a story to enjoy it?
• Edict Zero:FIS
• The Lab Rats - Devil’s Train
• https://monsterjavaguns.com/
• OK, so we gave up on the book and just talked about games.

Our Next Audiobook

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Star Trek: The Continuing Mission

The Next Audiobook Club Recording

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Right now we are working through a backlog of older episode that have already been recorded. Once that ends we fully anticipate recording new episodes with listener participation.

Further Recommendations

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• Pixel Dungeon
• Raspberry Pi 2 Kit
• Dollar Nemoy

Feedback

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Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the HPR AudioBookClub. We had a great time recording this show, and we hope you enjoyed it as well. We also hope you’ll consider joining us next time we record a new episode. Please leave a few words in the episode’s comment section.

As always; remember to visit the HPR contribution page HPR could really use your help right now.

Sincerely, The HPR Audiobook Club

P.S. Some people really like finding mistakes. For their enjoyment, we always include a few.

Our Audio

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This episode was processed using Audacity. We’ve been making small adjustments to our audio mix each month in order to get the best possible sound. Its been especially challenging getting all of our voices relatively level, because everyone has their own unique setup. Mumble is great for bringing us all together, and for recording, but it’s not good at making everyone’s voice the same volume. We’re pretty happy with the way this month’s show turned out, so we’d like to share our editing process and settings with you and our future selves (who, of course, will have forgotten all this by then).

We use the "Truncate Silence" effect with it’s default settings to minimize the silence between people speaking. When used with it’s default (or at least reasonable) settings, Truncate Silence is extremely effective and satisfying. It makes everyone sound smarter, it makes the file shorter without destroying actual content, and it makes a conversations sound as easy and fluid during playback as it was while it was recorded. It can be even more effective if you can train yourself to remain silent instead of saying "uuuuummmm." Just remember to ONLY pass the file through Truncate Silence ONCE. If you pass it through a second time, or if you set it too aggressively your audio may sound sped up and choppy.

Next we use the "Compressor" effect with the following settings:

Threshold: -30db
Noise Floor: -50db
Ratio: 3:1
Attack Time: 0.2sec
Decay Time: 1.0 sec

"Make-up Gain for 0db after compressing" and "compress based on peaks" were both left un-checked.

After compressing the audio we cut any pre-show and post-show chatter from the file and save them in a separate file for possible use as outtakes after the closing music.

We adjust the Gain so that the VU meter in Audacity hovers around -12db while people are speaking, and we try to keep the peaks under -6db, and we adjust the Gain on each of the new tracks so that all volumes are similar, and more importantly comfortable. Once this is done we can "Mix and Render" all of our tracks into a single track for export to the .FLAC file which is uploaded to the HPR server.

At this point we listen back to the whole file and we work on the shownotes. This is when we can cut out anything that needs to be cut, and we can also make sure that we put any links in the shownotes that were talked about during the recording of the show. We finish the shownotes before exporting the .aup file to .FLAC so that we can paste a copy of the shownotes into the audio file’s metadata.

At this point we add new, empty audio tracks into which we paste the intro, outro and possibly outtakes, and we rename each track accordingly.

Remember to save often when using Audacity. We like to save after each of these steps. Audacity has a reputation for being "crashy" but if you remember save after every major transform, you will wonder how it ever got that reputation.