Getting Soapy and "Google Earth"

One ongoing discussion David and I have is about how we can get his voice recordings of the stories to be better. Whenever he sends them to me, there is a substantial background hiss. We have worked on this for a long time, but with his equipement (which is allegedly pro-level stuff: SM-58 microphone and a nice m-audio DI) it doesn't seem to be a possibility. It stresses him out because I whine about it every week, and it stresses me out because I always end up devoting way too much time to EQing out the hiss, and always end up damaging his voice to some degree.

Well, finally this week I broke down and purchased a piece of software called Soundsoap, or something, from BIAS. It works very well at noise reduction. It's not perfect, but it is a HUGE difference(as you can hear in this weeks episode), and only takes about 2 minutes to attenuate properly. So from here on out, David should sound much clearer, which is great.

I will also be going back and "re-mastering" all the old episodes (well, probably not 28) so that they sound better. It won't all be done at once, and I will be working backwards. Hopefully I will finish sometime in July. I'll let you know.

On a completely different note, someone charted on Google Earth the Catalogue of Ships.

If you haven't played with the Google Earth software before, have fun. it's a blast.