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Comment by drej | Hacker News Reader

Macs aside - this video clearly shows the wonderful experience you can get when an audio/video producer cares about audio quality. Spoken word recorded with clear audio is so lovely.

I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on a daily basis and I really really appreciate someone putting the effort into this. Thanks!

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I had a hard time watching him talk because the over dubbed audio is completely out of sync. It's really bad right around the 1 minute mark. I ended up minimizing the window and just listening.

I honestly don't care for this audio, it's crystal clear and perfect for a podcast but the video is of him sitting in front of a window with a dog and the absence of any environmental noise is odd.

Agreed. It's drifting around and rarely in sync.

Watching on iOS I had no sync problems. Maybe it’s a transcoding problem caused by YouTube? At 1:25 you can clearly hear how when he turns away from the camera the audio changes as well. I’d say the audio is recorded live, not dubbed.

I don't think it's dubbed. Just out of sync.

"Yeah, sorry about the audio sync. I was fighting it for the entire edit, and ran out of time to really nail it.

Next time, I’ll pipe the audio directly into the camera instead of relying on manual syncing during post, which had tons of drift."

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1059869643928670208

Thank you for confirming that I'm not insane. :)

He makes Overcast, the best iOS Podcasting app. Many good features to handle all the fiddly edge cases. Almost no complaints[0] and he keeps making it better.

[0] The only one thing I wish he'd add would be the ability to limit concurrent downloads to prioritize at least one of them finishing. I routinely get bad wifi and seeing 8 downloads at 55% is maddening.

The only complaint that I have is that the UI is ugly ugly ugly and has so much wasted space. The previous version had so much better UI.

I do agree with the wasted space part but why would you call it ugly? Also, I don't find the UI intuitive at all. Many actions like to go to the list of episode of a podcast you have to kind of start from the beginning. But ugly? No. In fact I find it pretty clean.

It's not an eye sore, but I say "ugly" because I don't like the organization, everything is misplaced in my opinion. Also thick lines and rounded corners galore.

Anyone looking for crystal clear vocals should do exactly what NPR does: Stick a Neumann U87 six inches from the mouth with the bass rolled off and use a P-pop and Bob's your uncle.

Money will be an issue with the U87, so you can look for good clones; there are a few in the market.

Boy oh boy, I can't stand that sound. Must be years of being trapped in other kids' parents' cars, who were educated and listened to NPR. I just wanted to listen to Big Douche and the Boys talk over the intro to Enter Sandman, like my high school dropout parents would.

What does it mean to have the bass "rolled off", and what is a p-pop?

Most studio mics have a setting to taper off the bass end of the spectrum. A pop filter is a grate/net that sits between the mic and mouth to stop letters like ‘p’ sounding like a blast due to the air flow.

I'd guess he means a pop filter.

The mic has a switch on it that imposes a hardware high-pass filter to counterbalance the proximity effect you get from being close to it. Since the mic is a cardioid mic (directional sound pickup) it would normally pick up a great deal of extra bass due to the geometry of the cardioid capsule (radio announcer sound, big and deep and bassy). The switch lets you take away that bassiness and the pop filter prevents the mic from going 'THUMP' when you say 'P' into it, and the combination of these things gives you that super-present, 'NPR interview' sound.

There's a running joke on ATP that Marco buys just tons of mics. Not to mention he made Overcast, so he knows audio pretty well.

I think he just buys tons of everything.

And then he sells them

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