Faux Audiolog Finale

Part The Last of this series of bogus audiologs for a game that never was.

Ugh, don't get me started on this one. I did so many re-takes I lost count. The biggest problem of all was fitting my own arbitrary time-length. Originally, when I thought this would be three parts, each one was going to be successively longer, 30 seconds for the first, 60 for the second, and 90 on the third. That ended up not really working out, so now it's four parts, each approximately 30 seconds with the last being just below 90. I couldn't let it go over because, in addition to DevART, YouTube, DailyMotion, and others, I've been uploading these to Flickr, which has a very strict 90-second limit.

In terms of the story, now that it's essentially finished (I did have an idea for a sort of "side-story" centering around the loader going haywire, just as a little throwaway), I wanted to give a few more details about what happened, but still leave it relatively ambiguous.

In terms of the technical side of these four little productions, they were all recorded the same way: on a cell-phone, specifically a Motorola ZN5, which, it turns out, has a really good little voice notes feature, with alarmingly good quality. Unfortunately, the format this little wonder records in is AMR, which is okay for playing back on phones, but it has to be converted into something else if you're going to do anything else with it. Luckily, I found a little freeware program that converts AMR to either WAV or MP3. What's funny about the AMR format is that its sampling rate is around 8kHz (to give you an idea, your voice on the phone is about 11kHz, and a CD is 44kHz) with heavy compression, but the artifacts created as a result are barely noticeable. Compared to an MP3 recording (on one of my more sophisticated devices) at 11kHz, the 8kHz AMR recording sounds leaps and bounds better.

There you have it: simple and readily-available recording devices and as little editing as possible. Hopefully, that "less is more" approach has paid off.