I recorded a new story yesterday instead of doing the edits I thought I was going to do–I just got started and it seemed to flow. Then I discovered the audio files on my phone suddenly all had a length of 0 megabytes each when it came time to transfer/transcribe them. No idea why. Didn’t want it to happen again. So I deleted the app I’d been using to record, and found another one.
That was the extent of my progress yesterday. Wasn’t happy.
Separately, I apologize to those to whom I promised copies of stories by now. I will strive to get them out today or tomorrow, depending on how this afternoon goes. (You may recall that I was bummed about foster parenting a couple of days back, and I foolishly let that affect my writing time. There’s a meeting today. Don’t really know what to expect from it. Ideally I’ll get/manufacture some peace of mind, instead of…say…getting pointlessly upset over stuff I can’t actually control? We’ll see.)
The new app on my phone records best in a format (.mp4) my transcription software (Dragon NaturallySpeaking) doesn’t recognize, but it uses dedicated audio hardware on my iPhone to do the compression, so it doesn’t take up much of either processing power or space. Nice! But then I needed conversion to something Dragon could work with, so I messed around with writing a script to convert .mp4 to .mp3 files, then I got concerned about the quality of the conversion…so I messed with that…then I realized I could convert the .mp4 file to a .wav file, which doesn’t use compression at all, so I ought to be reasonably confident of no loss in quality for transcription. Yay.
Side note: yep, I could record in .wav format initially. But it creates huge files, and I think the quality is pretty good with my current settings. Also, Dragon doesn’t like my max-quality .wav recordings, and I don’t know why. Not willing to mess with it further right now either.
What’s all the above mean? It means I’ll try to do edits this afternoon. If not, definitely by tomorrow, because I’m already breaking promises and it bugs me. And meanwhile I hope I’m making progress of figuring out the fiddly bits.
(Also? I liked that now-nonexistent story. Let’s see if I like the new version when I get back to it, if I “write” it roughly the same way…never had this come up before, I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing.)
Have fun out there!
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