In this episode the HPR Audiobook Club discusses the audiobook The Terrible Business of Salmon & Dusk by Myke Bartlett

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Non-Spoiler Thoughts

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• The terrible business of trying to listen to this book (technical difficulties abound)
• We talk about the audio players we tried to get around the technical difficulties.
• This book is a weird world.
• The reading performance is great, and the audio quality is good (minus technical difficulties).
• The is a clear distinction between characters by the reader using voice and accents.
• This pushes the definition of "magical realism". Perhaps "surrealistic" is a better description.
• The world is slightly more interesting than the characters.

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 Material Player which is now called Voice
• x1101: Monty Python's Holy Grail - Black Knight's Reserve
• pokey: Long Trail Double Bag Ale and The Rusty Wallace Formula Experience

Things We talked about

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• Why are two sticks of chalk important?
• Does this end by not ending?
• Thaj thinks this is trying too hard to be clever. Both and Thaj and x1101 think Tincture does weird better.
• Is the fallen a metaphor for depression?
• What is going on with The Albion?
• "There are a LOT of things that can use a little more explanation."
• Thaj thinks The Rainbow Thief and Adjustment Team may be inspirations for this story. Pokey raises with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who.
• Also Kato from The Green Hornet...
• We disagree about how the time travel was done.
• Nero is the character we all felt the easiest to follow.

Our Next Audiobook

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Murder at Avedon Hill by P.G. Holyfield

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 epsiodes with listener participation.

Further Recommendations

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• Pokey goes to the races.
• Sometimes it's just easier to nuke and pave.
• New (Old) phones.
• Android File Explorers
• Audio Book Player Link: https://material-player.en.uptodown.com/android
• F-Droid link: Audiobook player now renamed Voice https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.ph1b.audiobook/

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.