LRRcast for 2014-05-23

[Paul]

Join James, Paul, Kathleen and Alex as they dive head first into your questions.

[Paul]

Correction: I got the name of the the sea shanty group I recommended wrong. Their name is the Fisherman's Friends of Port Isaac (http://www.thefishermansfriends.com) and the album is Suck 'em and Sea

[All Buns Glazing]

I literally could not resist gifing this. My apologies, Alex.
https://www.giflike.com/a/ddW2I3c/lrrca ... 2014-05-23

[Jamfalcon]

Paul's first answer to the picnic question isn't just him — cold KFC is a staple at my extended family's annual picnic.

[Loonatic1993]

In Paul's defense. Fried chicken at a picnic is definitely a southern U.S. thing.

[Duckay]

Now I'm a little worried. I hate sitting across from opponents who don't say a word to me unless it is necessary for the game, so I try to be what I thought was polite when paired with a stranger. Saying hi and asking how they are when they sit down, introducing myself, offering to shake their hand, all that sort of business. Now I'm wondering what the line is between "being polite" and "being too chatty".

[Jamfalcon]

The impression I got is that when they say someone is too chatty, they mean the person is continuously trying to carry on a conversation unrelated to the game. I doubt many people have a problem with a brief exchange before the beforehand.

[Graham]

I'll say hi, I'll shake their hand and introduce myself if they do the same, but during the game I won't say much unless it's relevant to the game itself.

[Omnicrat]

Yeah, that was me Kathleen is complaining about in that video. Sorry about that, it was one of the first times I played paper magic and I was really nervous.

That happened at LRRcon in the theros block draft at the end. I don't THINK I did that in any of my other games, so at least I learned.

edit: I feel really bad about it, especially since I didn't expect to win, and it was your worst magic pet peeve.

[Kaziel]

In regards to Godzilla vs Gamera, the latter was made by released to be a rival to Godzilla in the movie marketplace, so no.

Otherwise, great LRRCast!

[Balrox]

Alright, since this kept bothering me about the podcast it was finally time for me to make a forum account as well. I usually listen to your podcasts while on my way to Uni, cycling along a busy street. That usually would be no problem for listening to podcasts, I just need increase the volume. But here is where I keep noticing that the audio levels are terryibly uneven. Sometimes Alex is barely audible, and then James almost makes my headphones explode right after I increaseded the vol. to hear Alex. This is of course only natural, because obviously people don't stay the exact same length away from the mic all the time, and speak at different volumes. I also understand that I don't know jack about how you postproduce the podcast, but please, if possible, could you consider using http://www.auphonic.com to fix the audio? Auphonic is very well established in the german podcasting scene for doing pretty much the complete post-production on podcasts perfectly, it's especially known for it's very good intelligent leveler and normalizer (also, the web client is free, yay Edit: About a week after I posted this auphonic went freemium, with 2hr/month of free audio processing. God damnit.).

But enough pleading, it was a great LRRcast, as always

[Therberus]

I'd like to second that request Balrox, it seems sometimes that the different voices are just not at the same volumes !

But in any case, I love the work guys, keep it up !

[Graham]

We'll look into some normalizing. Thanks for the feedback!

[Christopher]

Here's a quick and easy way to set levels and compress the audio a bit.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130729204551id_/http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/

It's not being actively maintained anymore, but it's free and it works well. It's worth giving a shot, if only for the fact that it's completely straightforward. No settings to futz with. Just drag and drop.