CerebralMix 2015-09-20: Poetry Series Ep 7

You might have noticed recently that the show in podcast form isn’t quite the same as it is in it’s streaming broadcast mode. There is a reason for this: I used to record the show from the stream, but I don’t do that anymore. It seemed there were technical issues that would happen more frequently than I wanted and grew fairly frustrated with it.

This weekend would have been one of the worst catastrophes yet: I lost power at my house during the show for about 5 minutes. In that amount of time at least 4 tracks had run on the stream. Of course I could have repaired the damage had I been recording the show. I have done it before, but I typically don’t like doing it. I never feel like the balance is quite right when I have to splice tracks into the show (most people probably don’t notice it, it’s really a technical matter).

So, I started putting the show together for the podcast manually. And that’s when I started to notice some of the technical issues that were coming up with the tracks: signal over-saturation I’ll call it (clipping is another term used for it, but typically these tracks were just short of clipping), and other level balance issues. Well, that has resulted in me taking more time to learn about signal processing, mixing and some minimal studio techniques. So now, the show that you hear on the podcast is likely a better show than what is streamed live, at least in sound quality.

But this has also brought about another thing with the show. the track timings don’t always line up in the same way. When I am putting the show together here, I don’t overlap (aka cross-fade) between tracks. Ironically, when I first started doing the CerebralMix Podcast, before I it started streaming, I used to put in cross-fades. The thing was, in the old days I had a way of inserting the cross-fades automatically, which I don’t have now (maybe I will do it again, find a way to merge the old process I used to use in with the current production method I am using).

But all of this has just been to provide an explanation for why this particular episode of The CerebralMix is 3 hrs, 23 minutes long when the broadcast version of the show was actually under 3 hours in length. And, it is also an explanation of why the times in the playlist below don’t completely match up with the show itself.

Readings

All of the reading for this show (and the whole Poetry Series) is being taken from readings released by LibriVox. All of these readings are in the public domain, and can be found on the first ten volumes of their Short Poetry series of releases.