In a recent article on Aces Full of Links, James poked fun at Unbecoming Levity's first ever audio content for being “not very exciting”. The audio detailed my midnight run to the bookstore to get the new Harry Potter book, and James is right–it wasn't very exciting–on purpose. You see the government has been trying to surpress what happened at the Hearns & Berble bookstore on July 16'th, and they attempted to substitute bland and uninteresting material for all of the audio and video recorded there that night. I've just returned from there having recovered the flash memory chip that I hid under a trashbarrel, and can now bring you the real audio from the evening's events…
WARNING: The below audio contains some foul language and violence and may be particularly offensive to devoutly religious individuals. The piece is intended to be humorous parody and no offense is intended. If you can't take a joke, don't click the link.
| What Really Happened (audio, 1.58 Mb, 6m 48s) |
 This work is licensed under aCreative Commons License. |
That file is currently hosted on my Comcast webspace. I have no idea what the bandwidth limits are, but if people go nuts and click it to death, the file's just going to disappear. So download once. If you want to share it with someone else, email the downloaded file to them please!
Okay, that was really fun to make. First of all I must offer both credit and thanks to the author of the intro and exit theme, Tangential Cold. The original piece is called “A Pedantical Long Pelt” and I think it is pretty cool. Check it out. That piece was distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license, as is my derivative work. If you'd like to sample or use part of my audio, feel free, just be sure to include attribution to both Tangential Cold, and myself (as either “C. Seggelin”, “Plastered Dragon”, or “Abacquer the Belch”).
The sound effects come from a royalty-free collection of sound effects that I bought about 20 years ago on 4 CD's. They are collectively called “100 Sound Effects – The Ultimate Collection” which is a misnomer–since each disk has 100 effects there are really 400 effects in the collection. The CD's were published out of Canada by Distributions Madacy Inc. I have no idea if they are even still in business.
The audio of myself was recorded at 32 kbps using a SamSung YP-TZ7 1Gb Digital Audio Player.
I editted together various pieces of audio with Audacity v1.2.3 which is audio editting freeware for Windows. Given that it is free, I am really impressed with how slick and capable this software is. I would go so far as to say Audacity is to audio editing what IrfanView is to image viewing.
No popes were harmed in the making of this fictional newscast.
I'd say Audacity is even better than IrfanView. If you want to do complex amateur sound work, Audacity is probably all you need. If you want to work with images (other than viewing, resizing and some minor tweaks) you're going to need something other than IrfanView… a Photoshop or the Gimp.
But I would agree that both IrfanView and Audacity are must haves on the Windows system of anyone who likes to tinker with images and sounds.
I'll repeat, I kid because I love. My blog is dead boring lately. And this week is going to be even worse, likely. But your audio recording reminded me way too much of all the audio recordings I've made on my portable voice recorder — out geocaching with my daughters or doing whatever. I'm embarrassed to say that mine are even more boring than that. Me droning on about whatever. Bleh!
Maybe one of these days I will attempt a podcast, but right now I can't imagine anyone listening to it. Back in the day, if we'd had today's technology, I'm sure you, Brian and I would have put something together. Back when we had time and were in relatively close proximity.
Well. Anyhow.
BTW – I've already told Chuck that his account of the true nature of that night's activities was harrowing, enthralling, disturbing, and side-splitting.
And blasphemous. Just the way I like it.
Julie
James played this to me yesterday and I loved it. Very, very funny.
So many good parts to that audio. Loved it! Don't want to spoil it or I'd comment more specifically. Thanks, Chuck!