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The Connected Voiceover: Apps and Tools for the Modern VO
72 Plays1 year ago
In this VO Bar episode, fresh from VO Atlanta, Will, Victoria, and Al share essential voiceover tools and apps. From password security to cloud storage and DAWs, they cover how to streamline and secure your VO business. Packed with tips and personal insights, this episode is a must-listen for voice actors eager to harness technology for success. Tune in for an indispensable tech toolkit!
Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction and Tools Discussion
(00:00:30) Password Manager Recommendation
(00:09:00) Audition Storage and Editing Workflow
(00:29:58) Freelancing and Payment Methods
(00:33:38) Banking and Account Management
(00:37:42) Payment Processing and Invoicing
(00:45:32) Voiceover Technology and Connectivity
(00:52:44) Technical Troubleshooting and Solutions
Apps, Tools & People Mentioned:
- Bitwarden: https://www.bitwarden.com
- TSA Precheck: https://www.tsa.gov/precheck
- Clear: https://www.clearme.com
- Digital Ocean Spaces: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces
- AWS S3: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
- WeTransfer: https://www.wetransfer.com
- iZotope RX: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html
- Wise: https://www.wise.com
- Paypal: https://www.paypal.com
- Bill .com: https://www.bill.com
- WaveApps: https://www.waveapps.com
- VoiceOverView: https://www.voiceoverview.com
- Reaper: https://reaper.fm
- Adobe Audition: https://www.adobe.com/products/audition.html
- Twisted Wave: https://twistedwave.com/
- Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/
- Source Connect: https://source-elements.com/
- ipDTL: https://ipdtl.com/
- Cleanfeed: https://www.cleanfeed.net/
- Sonobus: https://www.sonobus.net/
- Connection Open: https://www.connectionopen.com/
- SessionLink Pro: https://www.sessionlinkpro.com/
- StudioLink: https://www.studio-link.de/
- Loopback: https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
- Voicemeeter: https://vb-audio.com/Voicemeeter/
- Dante Via: https://www.getdante.com/products/software-essentials/dante-via/
- George “The Tech” Whittam: https://georgethe.tech/
- Uncle Roy Yokelson: https://www.antlandproductions.com/
Our websites:
Recommended
Transcript
Post-VO Atlanta Reflections
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, this episode is airing. VO Atlanta just ended yesterday. Nice. So I'm probably editing on the plane home. Welcome back. Excellent. So yeah, welcome back. Thank you. And we'll be recording a new one tomorrow or the next day. We'll see. The better. This is the last one we'll have in the camp.
00:00:29
Speaker
So,
Essential Business Tools and Apps
00:00:30
Speaker
tools and apps and things. That's what we're talking about today. Toys. Yes, don't be a tool. Toys. Oh, oh, that. Right. Okay. Easy. No, I was thinking like business tools and applications and things that we use. Let's talk. To make business work and keep your stuff safe and so forth. Okay.
00:00:53
Speaker
Should I start? Feel free to begin. Okay. I'll start with the very first thing that I think everybody should have. And that's a password manager because most people don't use secure enough passwords and a password manager makes that easy. Yeah. So the one that I recommend is hang on. I gotta write this down in my password journal. Yeah. Have you seen those? No, God.
00:01:21
Speaker
So you can buy them like on Amazon or if you go to an actual physical bookstore. It's like, you remember a little black book, you know? Yeah, of course. Same idea, but it's for passwords. Like, come on.
00:01:34
Speaker
Are you kidding me? You might as well just put a freaking post on your screen and then hand your keys to your neighbor and let them come and steal your bank account. Come on. I may as well. Yeah, I might as well. Here, here. Let me just hand out $100 bills to everybody. Why not? All right. What's the name of the one that you recommend?
00:01:51
Speaker
So there's a lot of them. There's one password, and there's LastPass, and there's a whole bunch of them. The one that I like is called Bitwarden. Now, part of the reason I like it is because it can be self-hosted, which I do because I don't want to have to trust somebody else to maintain my stuff, so I have full control over the encrypted vault and all that. But that's not for everybody. Nerd. Well, yeah. That's, you know, my day job for 20 years. So, duh.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. But what about a simple folk? You simple folk can just go to bitwarden.com. Here's the other reason I like it. It's free. For a personal account, it's free. Really? Yeah. And you can install it on unlimited devices. It works on all, every brand of phone, every brand of computer, Linux, Windows, Mac, everything. Works everywhere. You install it as a browser extension. It's available for all the major browsers. But it's not easy, right? What do you mean?
00:02:46
Speaker
It's super easy. Isn't that the one you said that was... If you self-host it, it's less easy. Self-hosting. Okay. If you use this, it's whatever. It's simple. You set it up, you install the browser extension, you install the app on your phone, and then you only need to remember one password ever. Just make sure it's a good one for that tool. Not password123. Yeah, no, not that.
00:03:11
Speaker
Okay, not a password. One, two, three. Yes, not bad. Just writing caps and exclamation point. Yeah, write it in leet speak with zeros and...
00:03:22
Speaker
There you go. That'll work. So that would be the first tool that I would recommend that everybody install and use because it costs you nothing and it improves your security and you don't have to worry about like, oh, somebody got my password and took over my Twitter account and whatever. Now here's the question for you. You replace your computer. Do you have to reload it or does it follow you around? Obviously like when you change upgrade phones.
00:03:46
Speaker
Right. So it's in the cloud. So all the passwords that
Audition Storage and Security
00:03:50
Speaker
you store are in the encrypted vault in the cloud. OK. OK. So it does follow you. Yeah. Yeah. You would still have to install, you know, the browser extension on the new computer, of course, on your new phone. But the information that you have stored
00:04:05
Speaker
Everything's stored, yeah. So then you just log in and you're good. Bitwarden, got it. And so what it does is it associates your username and password with a particular login. So when you go to that site, like say Google, I've got, I don't know how many Google accounts. No lie. The little number badge shows up on the browser extension up on the address bar, like five or whatever. And that's how many logins you have. And then you just like pick the one you want and it'll fill in the fields.
00:04:32
Speaker
Nice. Nice and easy. Nice and easy. It's wonderful. And then you can also store other things. So if you wanted to store just a note that is in your encrypted vault, you can do that. I've got my TSA pre-check ID stored in a note. One of the greatest inventions ever.
00:04:48
Speaker
love TSA Pre-Check. Yeah, it was even better when not as many people used it. Yeah. But it's great now the lines about as long as everything else. Now you have to get clear. Yeah. Which apparently I get credit for with my credit card. So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely a nice benefit. I mean, I guess that qualifies, right? Clear in TSA and all those other Pre-Check things. Absolutely. Those qualify as a tool or an app, right? Yeah.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah. Get that if you're going to travel. Yeah. Better. The amount of time that I save, and I don't travel that much, but the amount of time that I save going through security with that is phenomenal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's good for like five years, so... It's the best kind of a number you can spend. Yeah. It's also good for concerts and events at certain venues. Really? Oh, sure. Yeah, because TSA is at some of those now too, yeah.
00:05:38
Speaker
Uh, I know that when we were checking into city field in New York, they have clear sections as well. So that was kind of nice. Interesting. So I saw this on some Facebook group. I don't remember which one. Um, they were talking about how long you should keep your auditions. Oh yeah. Yeah. I saw that too. So, I mean, I have a collection, unfortunately quite a collection of hard drives because I've paid way too much for other.
00:06:03
Speaker
cloud storage from Apple as well as Google. I'm paying more for cloud services than I probably should, but it's one of those things. It's almost like all those photos that you get on your phone. I have 25,000 photos just on my phone alone, not including the ones that have already uploaded and archived. Good Lord. How many of those are small dogs?
00:06:25
Speaker
Probably 24,986. The rest are baseball photos? Okay, I was gonna say the rest are your kid. Yeah. Yep. Wonderful. Well, my little fuzzy dogs are, you know, they're my children too, so there's that. But yeah, a lot of dog features and cats and yeah, just too many things like that. So yeah, I answered that question on Facebook and I said I keep everything forever because storage is cheap and I have a lot of it.
00:06:52
Speaker
I don't have cheap storage. Where are you keeping it? Because it's not that cheap. Well, external hard drives are pretty cheap. Oh, OK. You have physical externals? Well, mine are actually internal. So I've got a custom-built machine that is a Hackintosh, which is going away eventually because the Apple Silicon, that's no longer a thing. So it's a custom-built machine that runs the Mac operating system. And I have eight terabytes of storage. That ought to be enough. Inside? Yeah. Just inside. I've got an eight terabyte rate array in the machine.
00:07:22
Speaker
And then I have another like external. I've got another 12 maybe. I don't even have it turned on. I don't turn it on because that thing just constantly spins up and down. And the sound is just annoying. So I never even turn it on. But I have it if you need it. If I need it. Yeah. And then I also have network storage and I've got 20 terabytes total there. Crap. Something like that. I know right. I have post-it notes. I keep things on post-it notes.
00:07:50
Speaker
The problem with that though is that it's all physical, which is fine, but it's all here. So if, you know, my house blows up or whatever, then it's all gone. So I need to get something stored in the cloud somewhere or just offsite. Even if I just made a copy of a hard drive and like drove it across town, that would be fine.
00:08:08
Speaker
Hard drives degrade though, so that's not really the best long-term forever solution. The best long-term physical storage is tape, which people think is weird because that's such an old technology, but it's still, it's like the de facto standard is magnetic tape. But if you put it in the cloud, then they're already taking care of that anyway. I worry about security without a little bit. However, you know, I'm guilty of not keeping my auditions forever. Nobody wants to hear my old bad auditions.
00:08:37
Speaker
I think it could be useful for you if you're ever feeling bad about yourself. You could go listen to an audition from three years and go, go, no, you know, I'm actually doing pretty good guy. He sucks. What the hell was he thinking? Or, you know, in some cases you could listen to one from last week and go,
Efficient Project Organization
00:08:53
Speaker
what the hell was I thinking? What was that about? Yeah.
00:08:56
Speaker
You know, auditions, I don't think, are as big of a deal, necessarily. I mean, you always hear about people, oh, I booked the audition, they just want to use that as the final. Yeah, I suppose that happens sometimes. It doesn't happen very often.
00:09:08
Speaker
No. But that's a good reason to keep them, I suppose, for a little while. But that's not going to be something where it's like two years later, they go, oh, we loved that audition. We just love to use it as is. Can you send us a higher quality? That's not going to happen. It'd be a couple months, maybe. Yeah. I keep everything because it's just I have it. It's easy enough to keep it. It would be more work for me to just go back and delete it. But I also keep my stuff really pretty well organized. So I've got it broken down by year. And then within the year, I've got it by month. And then within the month, I've got auditions, bookings, and
00:09:37
Speaker
demos. And then within the auditions, I've got it broken down by the source of the agent or the, you know, pay to play or whatever. And then inside of each of those, I've got the name of the thing and, uh, and my audition. So every single audition I do is its own project, which is overkill, I suppose for some people, but my workflow is so quick that it's not any faster for me to do it separately because I can, when I'm done, I just hit render and it renders out that ring, you know, or if
00:10:05
Speaker
Or if it's something where there's multiple roles that I'm auditioning for on the same project, I might do those in the same project file and then render out regions because with Reaper I can just make grid a region around a section and then use wildcard naming to output different file names per thing. You're making faces like I'm talking about stuff that's just crazy difficult, but it's really, really easy.
00:10:27
Speaker
No, because I just don't do that. It's like I'll keep the keep the raw audio from bookings, but auditions. Bye. Yeah, but you were just complaining the other day recently about why do they have us name the file with just our name and nothing else? That's why I delete them. Yeah. But if it's a different project with a different output directory for each project, then it doesn't matter, you know, unless there's two files for the same thing that have the same name. But I've never had that happen.
00:10:57
Speaker
I have files for my reps in years. That's it. That's all I get. This is my filing system. Then for anything that I don't feel like dealing with, I put under same name under that rep.
00:11:14
Speaker
and or year so that way when I'm done recording and I go to save it with you know Victoria Prather dot mp3 and it's like you've already got too many of those put it in same name because it means for me I don't have to like go and dig through the whole directory to find it it's
00:11:32
Speaker
immediately there within Adobe Audition. So that's easier for me to do that. And then after each audition, I have to go back and rename it. That was for XYZ company. That way it doesn't pop up if I do Victoria Prather underscore take one.
00:11:50
Speaker
But see, if you use my system, you wouldn't have to rename anything. I know, but it's a lot. It's not a lot. He's just got lots of practice. He wore a shortcut for a new project, a new project tab specifically. So it just adds a tab and it pops up and asks me for the name. I type in the name. It creates the directory. It creates the
00:12:09
Speaker
writes the project in the directory, it
Cloud Storage Solutions and Costs
00:12:11
Speaker
creates all the media folder and all the stuff. I record my thing, I do my edits, I hit render, and it spits out the rendered file into the rendered directory within that project. And then I hit the show files button on the render window so it pops open the finder window with word output too and I drag and drop that to my email or whatever. I get my pay to plays and I file those in audition.
00:12:16
Speaker
directory.
00:12:37
Speaker
I get you, Al. Al, you and me, we understand this. Will is next level. Well, I used to do that. So when I first started, I had one project that I just left open and I would hop on Pay2Play or whatever and I'd knock out 15 or 20 auditions and it would be all in one file and I'd just render them out from that one file and they'd all end up in one uncategorized directory.
00:13:01
Speaker
And I'd have to go dig through it and find it. And it was easy to find because I would sort it by file creation date. So like the newest file was always on top. And I have this directory still. It's got like 500 files in it. Do you look at it and laugh now? No, I tend to never look at it again. There you go. But keep it.
00:13:19
Speaker
But yeah, I still have it. That's not on the computer anymore. I moved that to the network storage, but I still have it. Although I did hear an incident about auditions and keeping them on file. There was a female voice actor who, because she got the audition, realized the company had used her audition
00:13:40
Speaker
I never paid for it. Never paid her for it. Used to audition for something online. But then when the new spec went out, it said, we'd like to replace this current version that we have running. She's like, that's me. That she was never paid for. So that was a very good reason to have the original audition take.
00:14:07
Speaker
that she had, you know, she had it on file and be like, you never paid me for using my work. And I think she was getting, you know, an attorney, lawyering up. Why wouldn't you? I mean, I can't imagine. If you can't resolve it on your own, then absolutely get a lawyer. And because you have proof, that's like any lawyer is going to win that case. Right. Oh, wow. Can you imagine like going to listen to the scratch track and you're like,
00:14:33
Speaker
Hang on. That sounds really funny. No, I auditioned for that. Wait a minute. I recognize that guy. Who is that? Oh, wait, that's me. Hang on. I was not paid for that, but thank you. Yeah. It's similar, I suppose, with, you know, AI clones and stuff these days too, right?
00:14:53
Speaker
Well it's, yeah, I think that that's certainly a podcast all on its own because I think when they're blending and mixing our voices to where we're not able to recognize it, that's a problem. That's a big problem. Sure. But in order to not, you know, having the storage solution, a password thing, I would have, I really needed that information. Yeah.
00:15:16
Speaker
when I got my new phone,
Audio Editing and Recording Tools
00:15:18
Speaker
because everything I, I'll never be able to log into the security camera again. I have to reset it, which is going to reset everything in my house. So I'm like, okay, fine. We'll just leave that camera off. But yeah, I didn't need to know that anyway. You know, security by obscurity. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I just think that there's a camera there. Yeah.
00:15:42
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. I've done that. I've put the protected by sign out in front of the house. I was going to say, do you have fake cameras? Because you can get fake cameras where it's the shell and it's got like a little blinky light on it or whatever. I kept it there and it's got the light on. Absolutely. But I try to log in and it's like, no, you don't remember your password, but you can reset it. You'll just reset your entire security system over. I'm like,
00:16:07
Speaker
Again, yeah again again and again. So besides auditions I think more importantly is storing your actual client work Yes, because they could certainly come back months later and say oh, you know, we need to make a change We need to pick up here. Yes, you know, we're changing this line
00:16:24
Speaker
and okay well that's gonna cost you but if you've got it you can open the project back up go back into it just punch in yeah do that change and re-render it and ship it off and you're not you know screwing around trying to recreate it and cut it into some already edited thing or
00:16:40
Speaker
So that's a good reason to use, you know, non-destructive editing too, which you don't get, I don't think, unless they've changed it with Audacity. I don't think they have non-destructive effects you apply or just apply. I think the Series 3 or Version 3, they were making adjustments to it. So it's coming. But I've never had any issues with it. I've always been able to go back to old files, put stuff in. But
Payment and Banking Solutions
00:17:07
Speaker
then again, I keep raw.
00:17:09
Speaker
which makes it so much easier to get back in. Oh, yeah. Well, but even just light EQ and normalization, trying to fit something in later after you've normalized the whole file, of course, is a bit of a challenge. I mean, you can do it. It's just a volume adjustment, but it is. Well, those are some tools, actually, too, in apps. A lot of folks are using Rx elements. Yeah.
00:17:33
Speaker
I have it especially. Yeah, those are helpful. But just a slight adjustment, not that you sound completely not like yourself, right? Sure. So I would say that the standard version of RX, Isotope RX, is absolutely worth it. Oh, yeah. Because yes, the Elements version, which is usually like 30 bucks, has de-clicking and de-noise. Yep. They're kind of generic. Yeah. Right? Whereas the standard version has mouth de-click and mouth de-noise.
00:18:02
Speaker
And they're like magic. Yeah, they really are. Incredible. I mean, obviously, ideally you'd want to just get and stay hydrated and not be clicky in the first place. There's the de-click right there. I wish there was stomach de-growl. I would like that.
00:18:19
Speaker
Seriously, I have a really bad habit of recording in the evening and it seems to be timed specifically, like when my stomach decides to go, hey, we just had this amazing Italian dinner, so we'll be down here for a little bit. Either that or I haven't eaten.
00:18:37
Speaker
It's one of the it's one of the yes, it's either and that is the worst I had that the other day I'm like oh my and the only thing that could and I had no time to go eat I Literally spent
Voiceover Management Software
00:18:48
Speaker
time looking on the internet how to get rid of a stomach growling drink water It would have taken less time to just go eat a cracker
00:18:56
Speaker
But unfortunately, I'm upstairs and I didn't have time. Did not have time. Didn't have time to eat. So I just kept drinking water and it actually worked. But I wish there was a tool. So if someone can build that, still make de-ground. That would just be like its own. We're on it. Its own plug-in right there. Billion dollar idea, Victoria wants credit. I do. And royalty. Just run a super high pass.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, just set your high pass around 10k. Yeah. No, no. I'm trying to think what else I use. Oh, has anybody used? So on the road, maybe it's not relevant anymore. You guys let me know. I had a couple of things happen. No, that's not relevant. I guess it's not relevant. I was going to say,
00:19:49
Speaker
I used to have to have an MP3 converter on my phone and I didn't pay for it this year because I'm like, I don't think I've used that in a couple of years. I had my beats on and recorded into my phone and audition on the streets of New York in a corner with my, took my jacket around my head and just did an audition right then and there. It must have sounded awesome. It was amazing.
00:20:20
Speaker
But they were very, they were okay with it, though. Like, we don't care, just use your phone because it doesn't matter. It does not matter. Okay, it doesn't matter, you sure? I feel like things have changed a little bit, you know, with kind of the requirement of everyone having a quality studio and everything. Like, I think the expectation is that auditions are going to be fairly close to what you would get in the session. Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, you still hear about people booking stuff by recording on their phone, but God, just
00:20:32
Speaker
They didn't care. They didn't care. Did you book it from the audition? I don't know why.
00:20:45
Speaker
I can't imagine. No. There was somebody who said that at the last conference. Yeah. I know somebody who did it just within the past couple of years. They took something. They were on break. They still had a day job. They were on break and they went out in the car and knocked out a couple of auditions on their phone and booked some of them. They even have had one where they used that audio. I don't want anything that's on this phone.
00:21:12
Speaker
It's got a spider web crack in the front. I don't know.
Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)
00:21:16
Speaker
So what you're saying is call, don't text? It's good. It's fine. Don't worry. It's fine.
00:21:25
Speaker
Everything's wonderful. But no, I don't have anything like that on my phone. I did. I think I did look into lightweight DAW apps that would run on the phone or tablet at some point. But I just bring my laptop. I've got a MacBook Air. It's tiny. Yeah. I think that's that's just a standard now, right? Like we just don't do that. So. Or here's a wild idea. Take time off and actually disconnect.
00:21:50
Speaker
I know. I still occasionally leave the house and leave my cell phone at home. That I don't do. Wild, right? Because I might need to call AAA because I got a flat tire. Well, the last time I
Audio Routing and Remote Sessions
00:22:01
Speaker
did it was on accident. I was, you know, five minutes from the house. I went, oh, I didn't bring my phone. All right. It's like being back in the 90s. I'm out and I'm unreachable. This is great. I know. It's kind of nice. It is nice to disconnect. And then you come back to an emergency because you weren't reachable and whatever.
00:22:18
Speaker
So you were asking about storage. I assume you were alluding to cloud storage solutions and file transfers, probably. So I've got a app that I run on my cloud server called OwnCloud. Oh, is that the colossal gnome? Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. So it's just file storage, but it's got a bunch of plugins you can put like your calendar management.
00:22:41
Speaker
there too. And you can hook it up to any S3 compatible storage backend, which everybody has them. Amazon, obviously, S3. Google has one. DigitalOcean has one. And so you can plug into that as your file storage space with it. And that's pretty cheap. So like DigitalOcean's S3 compatible storage is 25 gig for five bucks, I think.
00:23:05
Speaker
Hm. It may be more than that. Let me look, let me look so I'm not saying the wrong thing. Don't lie. That doesn't sound like, that doesn't sound like much. Starting at five dollars a month, 250. I was off by, you know, an order of magnitude.
00:23:18
Speaker
Sorry, help my brain. Is this when you want to transfer a file to someone? Like a WeTransfer? So you could use it that way. And I could do that with owncloud because I can create share links on specific files or folders. And I would assume you can do that with S3 compatible stuff too, because I know you can do that on
00:23:37
Speaker
on Amazon, so I would assume they all kind of have that. But really S3 style things are just a block of storage. So DigitalOcean, for example, is five bucks a month for 250 gig of storage. And with that, you get a terabyte of outbound transfer. So if it was completely full of 250 gigabytes of data, you could send all of that out four times in a month before you're charged anything beyond the $5.
00:24:07
Speaker
And it costs nothing to transfer in. And then additional transfer is only a penny per gigabyte transferred out. And additional storage is only two pennies per gigabyte beyond the 250. We're talking pennies here. Yeah. So if you had 260, then it'd be an extra what? 10 pennies. 20 cents. Yeah. Nothing. That's nothing. It's nothing. So it's really, really good, cheap stuff. You can do a job on V123 and make that up right there.
00:24:39
Speaker
pennies for everyone. You could do a job on a fiver to pay for them. You'd have to do two jobs on fiver because they're going to take 20%. You'd have almost enough left over to get a hamburger if they were still priced the way they used to be. And you get a penny. And you can get a Whataburger. Yeah.
00:24:59
Speaker
So that's great stuff. And that's way, way, way more affordable than Amazon. Amazon S3 is great, but it's not cheap. Yeah. And it's a lot more difficult to understand the pricing model because they really... Amazon pricing is... The AWS services are incredibly vast. You can do absolutely anything with it, but understanding the pricing of it is... It's crazy. It's crazy.
00:25:23
Speaker
101 reasons why I don't do
Tech Troubleshooting and Support
00:25:25
Speaker
information technology day in and day out, because it hurts my brain. I like to watch people talk about it.
00:25:33
Speaker
Cause they just, they just go all, you gotta know. There's a lot to know. Yeah. Now in terms of sending stuff to people, we transfer what I use. Sure. Cause there's a limit, but it's so big. Like you're never going to hit the file size limit on a voiceover project. No, no, but I actually had to buy it this time.
00:25:56
Speaker
That's like, you're exceeding your limit. Really? Yeah. Did they make you, you went to, moved over to Google Drive? It did, but you know what's really nice? You know what's really nice? I bought it so I can make my own page. So when they go to upload it, they get to see what I put on there. And you get to name it yourself. It's like, your name dot we transfer dot com or something like this is really cool. Yeah. So it's the free version is great. Two gig is the transfer limit. Yeah.
00:26:25
Speaker
But that's per transfer, I think. I just know I was given a hard time. I'm like, fine, I'll buy it. I don't wish I'd never been that large, but... But if you pay annually, 10 bucks a month, you can send and receive up to 200 gig per transfer. And you get a terabyte of storage. I didn't even see the storage. So I have more storage. Yay.
00:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, so you could upload files and just leave them there. Yeah, I could. Yeah, now that I know that. But yeah, I just use it to send the final stuff. Yeah, sure. And you know, voice files aren't that big. The biggest I've ever had was, you know, a couple hundred megabytes of
00:27:03
Speaker
wave file, because I almost always send a wave and an MP3. And sometimes I'll send four files in place of one thing. So sometimes I'll send a wave and an MP3 that is just raw. Still got a little bit of very basic stuff.
00:27:20
Speaker
Nothing like no compression or anything crazy. And then the same MP3 and WAV that's been processed, depending on the client, right? Sure. Because if some clients aren't going to do anything, you know, like e-learning clients and corporate narration clients and stuff, oftentimes they're not going to do any processing. They're just going to take whatever you send and drop it in the timeline. So typically I'll send them a processed version.
00:27:44
Speaker
and the not processed version. So then if they really want the not processed version, they can have it. But if they're just gonna drop it in the timeline, at least there's a chance it'll sound decent. I had a three minute raw audio, I'm just looking at it here, that I had to send over. And it was close to 52 megabytes. And then they wanted little tweaks here and there. So having to like re, like punch in whatever line or whatever, it ended up sending multiple things to the same client.
00:28:13
Speaker
And then I'm like, you need to buy this now. Interesting. Was this for an updated on an old project? Or was this corrections to something that... No, this was a correction. I mean, they had to pay more because they did...
00:28:31
Speaker
more than like a 10% script rewrite. At first, they just gave me, oh, you know what? This doesn't sound right. Let's just add this in. Okay. We added it in and they're like, yeah, they want to rewrite the entire thing. We want to focus more on the whatever verse. It was already one of those things where it was just all corporate jargon anyway.
00:28:55
Speaker
You had to get synergistically aligned. Yes. Had to upskill and leverage my talents. Nice. Hashtag FML. When they pay, you're like, okay, yes, of course. How do you need that? I am happy to provide. Yes. Well, I mean, that's the job, right? I'm not complaining. Just sometimes, have you ever had a script where you're just reading it going, what are they really trying to say here? What are they saying? What are they hiding?
00:29:23
Speaker
Corporate culture is fantastic, is it? I had a client that I booked through Pay to Play and did a directed session. And the director and the client were not on the same page. So that was fun. Wow.
00:29:40
Speaker
But then afterward, they came back to me directly to do another thing. And they didn't exactly know what they wanted. So we went back and forth quite a few times to get it dialed in. And I ended up giving them a really, really good deal. You just wanted to get off the phone with them.
00:29:57
Speaker
I actually really enjoyed it and was hoping that it would become more long-term, more work. But I don't know if they ever actually even used any of the stuff we did in the first place. Because of the pandemic and things were moving targets. So I'm not sure if they ever actually launched or not. Hey, did they pay you? They paid. They did. They paid on time and they were wonderful to work with. I would work with them again in a heartbeat.
00:30:25
Speaker
apropose payments. So, I use Wise, the Wise app for, it's wonderful. I don't have anybody taking fees for me, for the most part. Isn't that the best? It's gorgeous. I love it. I can tell it when to convert the euros to dollars once it hits a certain mark. It does it automatically for me and then it does the transfer like this is beautiful.
00:30:51
Speaker
if you have a lot of international clients, but you can use it here too. I don't know if a lot of American clients tend to want to use PayPal. I've used Bill.com, which works really well. Oh yeah? Yeah. Interesting. I have Wise and Bill.com.
00:31:06
Speaker
Bill.com. Okay, I know, I just, I have gotten to the point where I'm like, no, I'd rather have them send me a check and wait for it before I give my money to PayPal. Sure. But that's what the TV station here and up in Duluth does for me. They actually send a check. Yeah, they send a check.
00:31:22
Speaker
All right. You're in town, so it's got to only take like a day and a half to get there. It spends. Yeah. Money's money. It's fine. I got no problem getting a physical check. Nope. I deposit it with my phone. Yep. To my virtual bank. Yep. Which goes, wait, is this your real name?
00:31:41
Speaker
I've had the same thing. Same thing. Yeah. I love the bank, but man, getting a straight answer out of them, whether or not they were going to accept the check. Oh my gosh. Because, okay. So when you... Please explain. I don't know how many banks do this, but at least a couple do.
00:31:59
Speaker
When you're going to do an electronic deposit by taking a picture with your phone and you send it through the app or whatever, they make you endorse the check, but then also say for deposit at bank, whatever. Right. And I've got no problem with that. Sure. If I know that they're going to accept the check. So I had one that was made out to me, but it was will not William, which on the bank, how confusing full name and, and it's actually a business account. So they'd really prefer that it be in the businesses name course.
00:32:29
Speaker
But they said it has to be in the business name or the name of the account holder. Okay, but I am the account holder. It's the common shortened version of my name that I go by. Are you going to accept it? Wow. You could not get a straight answer. I couldn't. I swear the chat had to have been like an AI chat. Right. Because I just could not get an answer and like they didn't understand the question. Yeah. You kept yelling representative.
00:32:57
Speaker
Finally, I was like, look, I don't want a detailed answer. This is a simple yes or no. Will you accept this check or not? Because if you won't, I'll just go cash it at my local bank and then I'll move the money in a different way. It was several days. I've been avoiding that and I really should get a local bank because there's this bank, Bank of America, who should actually be called Bank of America except for where you live.
00:33:28
Speaker
Because whenever I get, if I want to deposit cash, I have to drive two hours down to Minneapolis because we don't have any Bank Americas in Duluth. Well, to add more fun to this, I also have a Chase account, which should also be called Chase other than where you live.
00:33:47
Speaker
because I have to go down pieces around the country. I have to go down to Minneapolis for that too. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm going to end up having to open up a third account for Wells Fargo because they're the only bank in town. Well, they at least are pretty much everywhere. Not really. I have a US bank account.
00:34:10
Speaker
which pretty prevalent here in Minnesota at least. Sure, don't move. But there was a time where we were looking at moving to maybe Texas. There aren't any in Texas. Nope. And so I was doing tax return stuff and I was like, well, you know, if we move, I want to get the return. Nice. So I'd like to do a direct deposit, but I can't do it there because we might not have that bank account anymore.
00:34:37
Speaker
So I had to go open an account at Wells Fargo. Yeah. Fun fact, I had Chase Bank tell me that I couldn't use a bank address as my personal address when I lived in New York, because I happen everywhere in New York is a multi-purpose building, right? Sure. Where residential at top, but there's usually businesses at the bottom well, the bottom of our apartment complex is a Chase Bank. Oh my gosh. Same address.
00:35:02
Speaker
I'm like, I can assure you I'm the residential portion of the same address because it's got our apartment number at the time. And they're like, yeah, but representative.
00:35:15
Speaker
Representative. Was this someone local in New York that was telling you this? No. I mean, it was Chase Bank. Sure, but they have no idea how the buildings are set up. Clearly. I was like, guys. It was very confusing to them. I understand, but this is kind of New York, and yeah, we have the same address, but yeah, it's the same one as the bank branch.
00:35:35
Speaker
But address line two that specifies the floor in the suite is part of the address. I'm on the fiftieth floor of the bank. You live at a hotel? Well, I own the hotel and I live there. My life is very much like Monopoly.
00:35:49
Speaker
It was really crazy. Well, that's just one of our meeting rooms. I know, right? It was really bizarre. It was one of those things that I'm like, okay, can I just talk to your manager? So that was true. Oh, no, you did not do that. I totally Karen'd. I did. Before Karen was a thing, I was a Karen. Yeah. Or Becky.
00:36:09
Speaker
So why is WISE.com good if you're not familiar it lets you open bank accounts all over the world so that you can get paid in local currency usually by a bank transfer which by the way if you're also unaware is way more common in Europe.
00:36:26
Speaker
than here. People are more interested in writing a check or using their card here, but bank transfers are kind of the norm in Europe. I mean, even when I lived there, gosh, decades ago now at this point, people were giving... You're not that old. You're 21. I know. One decade ago. Yeah, but they were using their bank account information with routing numbers and things like that, which are common now, but at the time, I was like, what do you want my bank account number for?
00:36:55
Speaker
I was really suspect like, no, that's not how we're doing this. I'm protecting this information. I have this written down in my little notebook. Understandably, the euro has made it so much easier, but if you have clients in the UK too, why as well? They'll take all of the local currencies. Most of them. I don't think they take them all, but they take most. Probably not. Yeah. Pretty much any way that you're going to book work.
00:37:20
Speaker
I've done the UAE, I've done the UK, and Europe with the Euros. And there's still a cost to transfer the money between those accounts and between countries, but it's not terrible. No, not at all. Especially when you can waste. I think it's less than credit card fees. It's a lot less than PayPal. That's all I know. I do not like using PayPal. If you only need one reason, that's a good reason.
00:37:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So I use for invoicing, I use wave apps, which is free for a lot of things and they've got, you know, nice invoicing software and they'll accept payment by ACH or credit card, but only within the US. So if you have a client outside the US, you can still send them an invoice, but you're going to want to send, if you want to make a payment, I'd prefer you make a payment by bank transfer, whatever, or wire transfer.
00:38:12
Speaker
let me know and I'll send you that information, you know, because you can't put it into the invoice. And you can't do a regular ACH is, you know, a bank transfer, but just domestically. Right. I have my own template that I use for invoicing. I made the mistake of letting PayPal do it for me and then they took an additional fee. What? So the bank that I use, and I think you're with the same bank, Novo. They have invoicing as well, which is free. It's not free. The invoicing is free. The invoice is free. The transfer is not. The payment is not. Right.
00:38:42
Speaker
That's why I don't use it. But that's because it's a third party. It's a third party system. They use Stripe, I think, primarily, but they also support Square and PayPal as well. And all of them have fees because that's how those companies make money, right? Like PayPal makes its money on that 3% plus whatever fee. Sure. That's how all payment processors make money. Yeah.
00:39:03
Speaker
I mean, I get it, but I feel like they've really raised their fees at PayPal so much. Like even, I remember my sister sent something for a fundraiser for my son's baseball team, even so she sent it friends and family. They still took money from it. Which I believe they discontinued. Well, yeah, so I think they did that because they know that a lot of people were using it for business stuff. Yeah.
00:39:23
Speaker
And like, Hey, if you're going to pay me, pay me friends and family, but you know, come on, you're obviously like booking a demo or something. That's not a friends and family payment. You're not sending 50 bucks to little Billy for his birthday.
00:39:38
Speaker
No. Oh, five grand to demo producer X. I must be a really nice friend. We're good friends. Really good friend. Giving him money. So I think that's really why that happened. Yeah. Why that went away. But I'm trying to think of some other things that we use.
00:39:54
Speaker
Voice overview. Oh, yes. Good one. Voice overview is wonderful. I track all of my... Well, I'm not as good at it as I should be, but I try to track all of my expenses there. I track all of my jobs there and I track all of my auditions. Now, for the auditions, it's just a number, right? I'm ticking the box like, okay, I did like seven agent auditions today and three pay-to-plays or whatever, but I've got a number.
00:40:18
Speaker
per day. Right. And then I've got the number for the month. And so then I can see like, okay, I auditioned, you know, 300 times last month and I booked one. Wow. Neither of those numbers are correct. Do you have the phone version of that or is there a phone version of that? It's a web app. Okay. So you could open it on your phone. It's relatively responsive. You could use it on a phone. Yeah. The calendar is a little squishy. Yeah. But yeah, you could use it on a phone. I'm looking it up now.
00:40:48
Speaker
Voiceover view is super helpful. I think you actually shared it with me, Will, at the first conference where I met you there. And I loved it because I could put in all the travel expenses and it's really helpful for your business to be able to kind of track that. And then go ahead and download the entire spreadsheet, send that to the accountant or whoever's doing taxes.
00:41:09
Speaker
They added that last year to export your expenses and income in the right format for the accountant, which I do my own, so whatever. I don't do math. You keep saying that. I'm proud of that. I probably shouldn't, but I'm cheap and I don't want to pay somebody else to do what I can do myself, even though I hate doing it.
00:41:32
Speaker
I hate doing it because they know exactly how much we owe. Since I already have to pay money that I don't feel like I should ever have to pay anyway, I don't want to pay somebody else too. But they know how much they want from us. Why do they make me do the math? Yeah.
00:41:46
Speaker
Just give me a bill. What do you think you owe? That's enough on that topic. Let's move along. Or we will light our booths on fire. You said booths, right? I said booths. The two utes. The utes, yeah. What other kind of apps do you need as a voice actor? Well, there's the DAW, obviously.
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like we're all using something different. You're using Reaper. I use Reaper. And I think you both use Audition. I use Audacity. I love it. Oh, really? OK. I heard him say that earlier. For what I do, which is a lot of long form, and I do some e-learning and such, you're not over-processing it. So it's in my studio. It's very clean. It does exactly what I need it to do. Maybe one day I'll grow up and I'll get Adobe Audition. But right now?
00:42:39
Speaker
never had the need. I was using Audacity for a long time, but then I moved over to Adobe Audition because I was getting to the point where I couldn't upgrade my operating system without it perhaps conflicting with the current version of Audacity. So I got tired of like, so I ended up using Twisted Wave for a while, which was fine. It's very basic, did the job that Audacity could do.
00:43:06
Speaker
And then something happened with that where it just kind of got crashed and burned, so it went okay. And I was looking at Reaper and I was looking at Audition and I don't know, I think I just went with an Adobe product because I knew it. I knew it from back in radio. That's what we're using at the broadcast station. Yeah. Cool edit. Oh, that's true. Cool edit. Yeah. Well, but even without that background, Audition looks a lot more approachable initially when you first look at it.
00:43:31
Speaker
Reaper looks scary because it's got lots of buttons and knobs and it comes configured for music production right out of the box, which we're not doing. But it's very configurable and you can strip all that back and make it just a very basic tool. But Al, it could be good for you. Could be good for me. If you're doing any music. Yeah. No music. No more music. No music. Okay. Well, even so, could be good for you.
00:43:57
Speaker
There's not a monthly subscription. I don't pay monthly. Thank you very much. There's not an annual subscription either. I hate subscriptions so much. Indeed. You pay for the license and if you're under, there's a discounted license for personal and commercial. It's an outright. Well, yes and no. It is a full license for two major releases. So if you bought it now, you would be good until Reaper 9 comes out, then you would have to buy it again.
00:44:27
Speaker
Gotcha. But there's lots of point releases before it'll get there. That would be good for at least two, three years. Can I just say I don't like the name of it? Why? Grim Reaper. It's got nothing to do with that. You know. It's actually an acronym. It's kind of why I like Twisted Wave. Like, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Like the new wave. You're Twisted. Yeah. Wave. Totes. So there's that. So it's actually an acronym, Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording.
00:44:54
Speaker
I got the audio right. That's what I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You had it. Reaper is really powerful. Reaper is on par with Pro Tools. Reaper will do everything Pro Tools will do with fewer restrictions because Pro Tools limits the number of tracks you can have. Reaper doesn't. Yeah. It always just seems like overkill for what we do.
00:45:14
Speaker
What depends on what you do, right? Yeah. Well, if it comes out the box ready for music, may not be of interest. If I've got to strip it down... It's not difficult to strip it down, and then you save that strip down thing as the default template.
00:45:29
Speaker
So you do it one time and you're done. Okay. Um, but then for, you know, for like punch in or punch and roll, you can configure exactly how much pre-roll you want. If you want pre-roll or not, you can have it do multiple takes where it'll like stack up the takes on top of each other instead of going over top and replacing where it's really super useful for voiceover is the rendering part of it and, and regions. So say you're doing a very large e-learning project.
00:45:56
Speaker
that's going to have lots of file splits. You could record the thing straight through and then go back and mark out the regions for each of the file splits and then render the project regions instead of rendering everything and splitting it up after or recording just one module and then rendering and then another module and then rendering.
00:46:14
Speaker
So you could record the whole thing as one big timeline and then mark out the sections for each file and name the regions accordingly. And then when you render it, you're not renaming files, you're doing any of that. So it's all based on that. I just don't do the same thing. Yeah, I think Audacity has a version of that where you can do the file breakdown and file naming. File splits. Yeah, file splits.
00:46:37
Speaker
The other thing about it that's really nice is that an audition I think can do this, but effects are not applied until you render, but you can still preview it with the effect on. So if you're going to do compression or whatever you're doing, you can apply that to the track, you can fiddle with it and make it sound right, and you can listen to it with that on, you can record with it with that on, but it won't get baked in until you render. So then if you have to come back later and you
00:47:04
Speaker
you know, do a correction or whatever, you make your change. You don't have to like unapply or reapply or none of that stuff. You just find the right spot, you make the change and you render it and you're done. Nice. But Audition has the heal, the auto heal thing, which is lovely. Yeah, that's cool. Especially for stomach rallying.
00:47:22
Speaker
That's cool. That's probably the most attractive feature of Audition because nobody else has it. Although Reaper has something kind of similar, it's very difficult to use compared to that. And Isotope has something like that too. And really, there's no reason to not have Isotope RX.
00:47:41
Speaker
That's true. Unless you're never sending anything but raw, right? So you're only ever doing commercial work and you're only ever sending auditions and then doing live sessions, then you don't need it. But if you're doing audio book work or e-learning or corporate narration or anything where you're sending finalized or even just close to finalized edits, you're going to want the declicker and all the other stuff. I'm getting super clicky right now, but no one will know because I'll run all that.
00:48:06
Speaker
Sound great source connect source connect. Yeah, which one standard source connect now is no longer a thing It's been replaced by Nexus. I bought standard about four years ago. Mm-hmm outright. Yeah, I haven't used it yet That's why I'm glad I bought it. I'm still paying for it monthly Yeah, that's why I'm glad I bought it because you never know when you're gonna need it. Oh
00:48:29
Speaker
But I was in the middle of a big project, it was making, it was paying, so I said, let's buy it and I won't have to worry about it. And I'm glad. You're ready. You're past the break-even point. If I remember right, the break-even point's like 18 months, 19 months. Then yes.
00:48:46
Speaker
Did I do that? No. Now this change, the new one that they've got, this affects only now, not standard, correct? Correct. Okay. But it's also a vast improvement over Source Connect now. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if things just go that way eventually. It's interesting. I've used it. It's free, but it's also paid. Well, so there's a free tier.
00:49:08
Speaker
And the free tier gives you anything you would need for basically Source Connect standard session. It's audio based. There's no video on the free tier. And it's kind of like there's no routing, I don't think. So it's whatever's coming through is what you get.
00:49:24
Speaker
With the paid level, you get multiple IO. So you could have five or 10 people on there and route everything so that they're each on their own track and can each hear each other but not themselves and all that stuff. But you also with the paid level get video. So kind of like our interface here now. And then there's also a button that lets the person record locally. It's not automatic, they have to hit it.
00:49:53
Speaker
But so then I could record a backup locally within the browser like we're doing here with Zencaster Sure, and then send it after the fact. I don't know ticket uploads automatically, but yeah, I used it one sponsor us pretty cool
00:50:06
Speaker
They might. We love Zancaster. Yes, we do. We love Zancaster. I know it was a very first time I've had Source Connect standard forever, and then I was a little disappointed because I had a session with this awesome project and they use Source Connect now.
00:50:28
Speaker
A lot of the specs say, must be source connect standard. In caps, not now. Okay. Here was a studio using source connect now. So that's cool. Then session link is one they like to use too. Super easy to use. Gosh. There's a whole bunch of them. There are. A whole bunch of them. IPDTL is another one. That one's really big in Europe.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. It's also fully compatible with ISDN, which is kind of cool. If you had to have an ISDN connection, you can use that and connect to an actual physical ISDN hardware somewhere. And they've also got day passes, which... Yeah, I've heard that. A lot of them do. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. I actually wrote a blog post about this a while ago, so I'm pulling that up. Clean feed. Oh, that's clean feed. That's a nice interface.
00:51:20
Speaker
Sonobus. That one's cool because it does like jitter correction and stuff. It's kind of intended for musicians. Anybody can use it for anything. Connection Open is another one. Session Link Pro, I think you mentioned. And then Studio Link. This Studio Link is cool. You would like it. It's in German. Yeah, of course. Of course, the technology is perfect. Those of us that don't speak German have to translate the site to understand how to get around. The app itself is not in German, but the website is.
00:51:48
Speaker
So it's an app that you download that starts, I think it fires up like a local server and then opens a web browser that points at it.
00:51:59
Speaker
if I remember right, that's how it works, but it also has plugins that you can install in the dock so that if you're able to use a plugin as an audio source, which you can in some, but not all, then you can record easily with it because it's a plugin. You don't need like loopback software. There's- I was just going to ask you. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I was like, talk about it. Talk about it. Good. Loopback. Tell us about that one. So loopback is cool. There's, so if you are on a session and you want to be able to play what you've recorded down the line, like if you're connecting to a client on zoom,
00:52:30
Speaker
or Skype or whatever and they want to hear what you just recorded or you do a quick edit and you want to play it for them. You need to be able to loop back from the output from your DAW back into your interface and down the line to them. Now some interfaces have that built in. I think probably most do not. On Windows there's free software called VoiceMeeter and there's a variety of versions of that. There's VoiceMeeter, VoiceMeeter Banana and VoiceMeeter Potato.
00:52:57
Speaker
the names are dumb and it's M-E-E-T-E-R meter. On the Mac the probably most popular one is called Loopback. It's from Rogue Amoeba and basically it just lets you map or route audio output from specific apps to specific places. So you can create inputs from those apps
00:53:17
Speaker
into channels that get, you know, the channels that show up in your DAW then if you're using that interface or that device. And they're just virtual. And I don't think there's a limit. And then you can send it to the monitoring output. So for example, if I want to send output from Reaper down the line on Zoom, then I have Reaper set up as an input as well as my mic.
00:53:38
Speaker
My mic goes through to the channel one and two or whatever output and Reaper also then goes through to channel one and two output. So I'm able to hear it and it's also sending down the line because I have that set up then as the mic, they get to hear it pretty cool.
00:53:53
Speaker
And I'm probably not doing a very good job of explaining it, but it's very easy to use. It's graphic. So for me, there's two things I would use it for. One is if I'm on a coaching session and I want to be able to hear what my coach is saying to me and have that recorded, because otherwise it's just going to be me recording myself and not hearing my coach. Right. And so you'll be responding to things they say, but then when you listen back later, you have no idea what they said. Right.
00:54:18
Speaker
unless I went like that. But the other part is so you could do like music and do, I'm going to call it karaoke. But if there is an audition that you need to have the music, so it's synchronized that it's not me just singing without laying the audio tracks separately, it's all together.
00:54:39
Speaker
Now is that a Mac product or is it PC? Loopback is yes. Now there's another one that I haven't used but it's I suspect that it's fantastic because it's like high-end pro audio stuff from you may be familiar Dante they do like live mixing stuff.
00:54:59
Speaker
They have an app called VIA, Dante VIA, and it's the same kind of idea. It lets you map software outputs to different inputs, virtual inputs. And you can also send it around over TCPIP, so you could send it from one computer to another on the network, for example. I want to say it's about a hundred bucks, and it is cross-platform. So I've not used it, but you could use that same app on Mac or Windows. So that might be ultimately the best option.
00:55:26
Speaker
But yeah, the nice thing about, uh, but loopback and, or any of these tools really is you have, because it's not just routing the audio around, you're routing it to different inputs and outputs. You can have, like you said, you're on, say you're on a Skype call or a zoom call or something. You can have the audio coming from that get recorded on track two while your mic is being recorded on track one.
00:55:46
Speaker
And then they stay in sync. So then if you're editing, like say we were doing this without this software, you know, that's, that's basically how we would do it is, is your audio would come in and I would put, you know, one of you on track two and the other on track three and I'd be on track one and there it is. But this makes that easier.
00:56:01
Speaker
But yeah, I do the same thing when I'm on a coaching session. I'll feed myself into track one and the other end on track two and I'll record it. And then I have that so that I can go back and reference it in the future. You know, like, Oh, what was the thing that they were talking about? I can go back and listen and I can hear what I said and what they said and your feedback on a particular read that we were working on or whatever. And it just, it's so much easier, but it's all, it's still separate. So.
00:56:26
Speaker
you know if for example we were working on an audition that i was actually about to submit i could hear my performance and their feedback and figure out which take was better show something together whatever and i can actually submitted because the two voices were separate so if we talk over each other they recorded separately so it doesn't matter.
00:56:44
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. So yeah. Awesome tools. That loopback is cool. Yep. There are a ton of tools. We're just kind of scratching the surface, but that's really the big ones that we use all the time, right? Mm-hmm. I will put links to all of them in the show notes. Show notes. Show notes.
00:57:01
Speaker
Cool. Well, thank you. I feel like we got the bigger picture of these things just because we have your expertise with the technology bit. Meet myself, I'm not going to speak for Al, but for me, I'm just a user. I know enough to make some damage, and then usually I have to call somebody like, hey, can you fix this? Can you undo my damage? Yeah. Why doesn't this sound right?
00:57:29
Speaker
I was working on a project and it's not working now. So yeah.
00:57:37
Speaker
Did you try turning it off and back on again? Hey. Thank you, Mr. IT. It's amazing how often that fixes things. Although I did two restarts yesterday and I reached out to Will. It's not recording my mic. My audition did not. I could hear. My interface was working perfectly. Everything was fine, except when I hit record.
00:57:59
Speaker
I had no inputs and I double checked out everything. It said everything was mapped properly. I don't know what happened.
00:58:09
Speaker
I had a similar thing happen to me just recently, like I suddenly noticed that the output when I would play back was way quieter than my direct monitoring, right? So while I'm recording, I'm hearing myself direct coming out of the output of the interface directly to my ears. It's not going through the computer first. But then when I would play back, it was six to eight dB lower. Oh, geez. Well, that's not right.
00:58:34
Speaker
Did we ever find out why? Yeah, I did find out why. So what what it was was I had loopback was turned on and was hijacking the output of Reaper. Gotcha. Which shouldn't matter, but apparently that was enough that it was just like siphoning some of the volume off. So what was coming back through to me was just lower. So I turned it off and it goes back to normal again.
00:58:54
Speaker
Oh, wild. I had to unplug my microphone and put it in a different port, a different channel. Like, all right, let's play stupid. That's what we did. It worked. That is a problem. You have to rewire your studio. You've got a problem.
00:59:09
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and that's a good time to call somebody like George the Tech or Uncle Roy. Uncle Roy, yep. And if you do have Adobe edition and you haven't like scheduled time with Uncle Roy on that. Oh, God, he changed my life. He totally changed my life with that. That was so great. Yep.
00:59:27
Speaker
So that's why he calls it life changing. And there's a reason that those two in particular are consistently recommended because lots of people could sort things out, but they're both very willing to hop on a call and are very available and they'll get you sorted out.
00:59:45
Speaker
And they know their stuff. They totally know their stuff. You're not going to get... Yeah. And they're both just genuinely pretty awesome people. People. Yes. What if we can get them on the call? I bet we could. I bet we could get them both on a call or individually. Yes. Let's make that a thing. Well, this episode is airing. VO Atlanta just ended yesterday. So I'm probably editing on the plane home. Excellent. So yeah, welcome back.
01:00:17
Speaker
And we'll be recording a new one tomorrow or the next day. Because this is going to be better. This is the last one we'll have in the camera.