I haven't been anywhere for fun this year except Berlin, at Easter. Unusually, I've had two trips away with work, to York and Preston, and it was nice to get a brief change of scene. I'm looking forward to a trip to London at the end of this month, though. Of course, there are lots of things to do indoors there, but it would be nice to get out and have lunch in a riverside pub, or see the wildlife at Richmond Park - that kind of thing. I can put up with cold and dull weather for another week or so, but I hope it improves by then, both there and here.
It's amazing how many producers of these seem to forget the name. As podcasts are (by definition) for mobile devices and therefore meant to be listened to on the move, the likelihood is that there will be background noise from traffic, etc. For safety reasons, the volume shouldn't be turned up so loud that this is drowned out. If the listener is on a bus or train, things are often no quieter. For these reasons, it's essential that the volume of a podcast should be "normalised" (i.e. the peaks should be at the maximum allowed undistorted level) and its dynamic range should be severely curtailed - that is, there should be very little difference between the quiet and the loud bits. I probably have hearing that is just below average in efficiency and I've lost count of the number of times the podcast was so quiet that I couldn't hear most of it (even when turned up to full volume on my phone), or had a section with various speakers muttering inaudibly in t...
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