What You Don’t Hear, You Can’t Fix

2 - WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR, YOU CAN’T FIX

You can call nine-year-old Jack 10 times, but until he “hears” you on his level, he won’t respond. He “can’t” because he hasn’t “heard” you. If you are a parent or have children in your extended family or even if you are around kids sometimes, you can relate. On the first call through the ninth one, you may not have broken through to his level. But, lucky you, the 10th one makes it through. And then Jack calls out, “Did you call me?” as if you may have simply whispered his name. If you’re like me, your response is typically a somewhat frustrated, “I’ve been calling.…” And Jack can be heard responding, “I didn’t hear you.” 

The same is true in VoiceOver. If I don’t hear something in a recording, I can’t respond and fix it. WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR, YOU CAN’T FIX. When I submitted my first audiobook, I was immediately relieved. I was finished. Then I was excited. I had recorded an audiobook! And, then I was nervous. Because now I had to wait for the Quality Assurance (QA) Team to take a look and let me know if it was good enough for publishing. 

Day 1 - nothing. Day 2 - nothing. Day 3 - nothing. Day 4 - problem. QA sent a report saying there were ISSUES. Ugh. Well really just one issue but it affected most of my files. The issue was that I had extraneous sounds/noise in the first and last 5 seconds of each file. And you can’t have noise at the start and end of the files. Well, my first thought when I read the report was, I know that! Surely I didn’t do that. I had like triple checked that one thing on each file before submitting. I went looking and still didn’t hear anything or see anything in my wave form. WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR, YOU CAN’T FIX.

I did a little online research, moved the volume control way high, changed my waveform view from linear to logarithmic and suddenly I could hear and see that bit of trash at the head and tail of most of the files. I felt so dumb. BUT…WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR, YOU CAN’T FIX. It was another one of those things I could add to the list of what I don’t know, I don’t know. For me, the real fix was when I later upgraded my headphones. A quality pair of headphones really does it. I hear things in audio files now with my new headphones that I would have sworn in a court of law weren’t there before when I was using my old pair. Because…again…WHAT YOU DON’T HEAR, YOU CAN’T FIX, but also WHAT YOU DO HEAR, YOU CAN FIX. 

Happy Recording,