 Hey there! It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk number forty, 46. I knew this was going to be that way. Yeah, it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work anymore. Okay. Alright now we have to have like a digital countdown. It's gonna say 46. Yeah, it's about time. Okay, we'll put a scoreboard up there. Anybody know after effects? My kid knows after effects. Hey, get on that. Alright, get Jacob in here. We got lots of cool stuff to talk about tonight, especially when it comes to all this new Mac stuff, right? Uh-huh, yep. You're maybe, I mean, if you're in the tech community, you're probably tired of talking about the new Apple stuff, but many of you maybe are not tuned in. So I'm going to give you my update on the new Apple computers that came out right after we went on the air two weeks ago and give you my take on these new surprisingly fast and affordable and quiet and cool and battery lasting machines. Cool. Well, in other words, so it's still working. It is. That's good to know. Alright, and we've got some stuff about limiters and lots of great questions from you guys, so stay tuned. It's time for voiceover body shop tech talk. From the outer reaches, they came bearing the knowledge of what it takes to properly record your voiceover audio and together from the center of the VO universe, they bring it to you now. George Widom, the engineer to the VO stars, a Virginia Tech grad with the skills to build, set up and maintain the professional VO studios of the biggest names in VO today and you. Dan Leonard, the voiceover home studio master, a professional voice talent with the knowledge and experience to help you create a professional sounding home VO studio. And each week they allow you into their world, making the complex simple, debunking the myths of what it takes to create great sounding audio, answering your questions, showing you the latest and greatest in VO tech and having a dandy time doing it. Welcome to voiceover body shop tech talk. Voiceover body shop tech talk is brought to you by voiceover essentials dot com, home of Harlan Hogan signature products, source elements, remote studio connections for everyone, voice actor websites dot com where your VO website isn't a pain in the butt. VO heroes dot com become a hero to your clients with award winning voiceover training, J. Michael Collins demos when quality matters and voiceover extra, your daily resource for VO success. And now live to drive from their super secret clubhouse and studio in Sherman Oaks, California. Here are the guys. Well, hi there, I'm Dan Leonard and I'm George Woodham and this is voiceover body shop or VO BS tech talk, tech talk, tech talk, tech talk talk. Thanks for sending that in Jeff. Yeah, fluid in just for you. All right, now we're going to get everybody sending in those. Since we're all alone here, we can't get we can have an audience. I'm, I'm staring at this empty couch with lots of gear on it. A telescope, a hat, a drill cables, a keyboard. No, they're on the side of the house. Okay, I haven't I haven't touched my RC plane since I plowed went into the side of building and it's like, I know the feeling. Yeah, you cloud my Mavic mini drone into a tree and into the ground and broke the gimbal right off. So not good. Yes, I know the feeling. Anyway, so we continue on here on lockdown here at the voiceover body shop and, you know, we're surviving. And you guys are surviving and we're getting lots of great questions and lots of very interesting variations on all the cool stuff that everybody tries to do in their home voiceover studio. And this is the time I mean COVID being stuck at home. This is the time to develop new ways to market your business, improve the studio you already have. And we're so darn lucky to be able to work from home. So lucky. Absolutely. Of course, as I was always saying, if this epidemic comes around and wipes out humanity, all of us voice actors are stuck in these booths. We're going to rule the world when this is on. Yeah, we'll have web of ways to teleconference with the rest of the world and log into other machines. Right. It is fascinating to watch how zoom stock has been zooming up and down and stuff. But it's changing the way we do things. But the great thing about zoom is it allows George and I to really sort of virtually come into your home and help you with your home voiceover studio. How do you like that segue? Nicely done. Thank you. Thank you very much. And the fact is, people don't really get what it's about because they think it's supposed to sound like you're on the radio or they don't really understand setting levels and all this stuff. George and I have been doing this for a long time. We understand what it's supposed to sound like. And there's a way to do it. And it has to do with the acoustics of the room you record in, how you use your microphone and setting proper levels along with a couple of other things because every voice is different. Every room is different. And so George and I will talk to you. You ask a lot of questions, George. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, sometimes my clients, you know, they want to give me their life story because it feels very relevant. Meanwhile, I'm just wanting to ask them the right questions. We ask a lot of questions. See, I sold life insurance and we were taught ask lots of questions so you can solve the problem. What is the problem person is having? So I ask lots of questions, but there is a pointed reason for the questions and what is your lifestyle and how, you know, where are you recording? Is your wife or your husband going to let you record in the closet? If not, what do we have? We can do something different. Are you going to do a character voice for a game? Are you going to wake up your child or the neighbor next door or get, you know, the police calling? Exactly. I'll be ready for this stuff. Just don't do this stuff late at night. But anyway, some people have to because it's the only time it's quiet. But if you want to work with a couple of pros that actually know what they're actually talking about because everybody else is an expert in one studio, probably their own, you can work with one of us. And if you want to work with Mr. Wittem here, how would they get a hold of you? You can find me over at GeorgeThe.Tech or the more mundane version, GeorgeTheTech.com. They both go to the same place. And that website will be replaced with a shiny new one at the end of the year. God willing. Can't wait. But that old funky website still works. You can find all sorts of services over there. If you're totally perplexed what to do, you can always send me a message and we'll get back to you about what you recommend that you purchase from that website because there's so many ways we can work together. Indeed. And Dan, you do a lot of the same things and slightly different ways and where do you go do that? Well, you go over to homevoiceoverstudio.com and contact me through there or read what I do. If you have a sample of your audio or would like to create one for me because I think one of the things that people forget is they'll say, I've got a buzz or I got a hum or it's crackling or there's an echo. And sometimes people don't have no idea what they're describing. The only way for us to understand it is for us to actually hear it. Is it a hum or is it a buzz? Or is it a buzzing hum? Or is it both? Or none of those. Anyway, you can go to the bottom of my homepage at homevoiceoverstudio.com and click on the specimen collection cup. Read the instructions and submit a sample to me for $25. I will analyze your audio and we will get your audio to sound the way it's supposed to sound. Anyway, end of this week's Plug a Peluso. Because by the way, that's why we're here. We're trying to tell you guys that we'll answer your questions, but if you really want to get your homevoiceoverstudio sounding the way it's supposed to sound, you've got to work with one of us. We don't try to sugarcoat it or try to enhance your sound. We try to make you sound like you. That's right. In your best outfit. Well, or in your worst outfit if you're doing like a Mountain Dew commercial or something like that. Anyway, what's in your tech update this week? It looks like it is very Mac heavy. Oh, that's a surprise, right? I mean, honestly, if there is anybody that knows any really cool new news in the Windows PC world other than, you know, super fast Ryzen processors and gaming GPUs, that is relevant to voiceover, please, I would love to talk about it. Let me know. In fact, put it in the comments below and I'll start talking about more Windows stuff. So you bought a MacBook Air a couple weeks ago. I did. You know, normally when Apple or really any company releases a brand spanking new thing, especially a computer or phone, I am not the first one to jump. This time was different because first of all, the new computer with the newest tech was not an expensive one, not nearly top of the line by any means and not top of line price. So it was within a realm of affordability for me. Also, my girlfriend had a pretty old computer. It's pretty heavy. Battery doesn't last long at all. And I thought, you know what, let's get her a new machine that I can also hammer on. So maybe it's sort of a bowling ball gift for her, but I hope not. She does enjoy using. And anyway, I pulled the trigger and I got a MacBook Air M1, which is this one's in what they call gold. But what I love about it is really more coppery than gold. And very light, I imagine, too. Yeah. It weighs the same as all the other MacBook Airs up until now. I think it's a little under three pounds. It looks the same other than, you know, this color, it looks the same. And, you know, mechanically, it's the same as the last generation one. But it has the ability to wake up, well, really, really fast, which is kind of interesting because, you know, Macs are known for that. But this wakes up like immediately. It's ready to go as soon as you open it. And honestly, even though it looks like a Mac book, it feels and operates more. It has that more instantaneous-ness, is that a word? Yeah. Instantaneanosity. We know what you mean. Yeah. It has that feeling of using an iPad or an iPhone, something that has a very extremely fast response to everything you do, never has a lag, almost never shows you any point of, like, where it feels like it's breaking a sweat. You can use this computer while doing video editing on your lap, on the sofa, without burning your legs, which anybody tries to do that. Doesn't matter if you do. With any existing Windows PC or Mac, it ain't going to happen. But you can sit there and do heavy-duty work on this machine, and it ain't going to burn your legs because it just never really gets hot. Maybe it's just ever so slightly warm after an hour or two of doing heavy-duty work, which I've been doing with this thing, just to see if it will fall down doing anything. I want to say all this with a grain of salt. This is not really to say this computer is ready to produce voiceover or do professional work full-time in your own studio. It is not. It is still extremely new. There are a lot of systems that don't work on it, namely, the one that comes to mind immediately would be the Apollo. But there's a lot of other systems that aren't necessarily ready to run on not just the M1 chip that's in this computer, but the Big Sur operating system that you are stuck with. If you buy a brand new Mac with an M1 chip, that's the silicon, the new silicon that's not Intel anymore, you have to use Big Sur. And for many of you, the Big Sur may really be the big problem. I'm able to run applications that ran on pretty much all the applications that I've tried that ran perfectly on my older Intel machines and running on Catalina with load and run on this computer pretty much. I haven't tried everything, but I have tried Audition, Audacity, Reaper, and Twisted Wave, and all of them have worked without any issues on this new machine. I've also tried a few audio interfaces that were handy, and those were the Sentron's Micport Pro 2, the Rode AI-1. Sean said that he's used it with his Creon, which is not very popular unit, but it's a more expensive one made by SBL, and it works. So there are a lot of audio interfaces that probably have not been tested yet on this computer that do work because they have... They just use what's called the plug-and-play driver, the USB audio codec or the built-in class-compliant driver. So anything that doesn't require you to install other software to make it work, very good chance it's going to work fine. I did run in one bug though, and this is why I'm going to tell you to be very cautious about buying something so new and putting it right into your production flow. I had this bug where a screensaver will pop up while I'm in the middle of working. And what's really weird about it, and I posted a video about this on my new Facebook group. I made a new Facebook group by the way called Mac and iOS for VO. There wasn't really a place for us to talk about Apple stuff in the VO community. I joined. Awesome. I'm glad you did. We're at like 500 members, I think. Whoa, jeez. I posted a video on there where it shows I have a screensaver on my screen, and then another screensaver starts. So it's like there's a fake screensaver, and then the real one starts. And then when I hit the spacebar, the real screensaver goes away, and then you see the fake screensaver going. It's really confusing and frustrating, and the only real fix is to shut the machine off, like literally hold the power button down. So that's why I tell you, as fun and interesting and fast and amazing as this new technology is, you must be aware it's not going to be something you definitely want to put right into your day-to-day. If you've got a machine that you're currently working well and you just want to be in with the cool kids and you got the money burning in a hole, go ahead and get it and start doing what I'm doing, testing it with everything and see what works, see what doesn't. They did release Chrome, Google Chrome browser for Silicon, so it works beautifully the way it should. So if you're a gamer and you want to play the Stadia games from Google, yeah, you can do that on this computer. That ain't me, but you can do it. Cool. Is that a rattlesnake on your microphone there? Oh, you noticed my pet rattlesnake. Yes, I just noticed that. If it moves, we're in big trouble. I got this when I was visiting Joshua Tree last week and it's going to go on my mountain bike permanently. Oh, okay. It's a way to scare off or like, it's like a little homage to the snake world saying, you know, we're cool, we don't need to be attacked or snakes. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Anyway, this is the new MacBook Air and one, if you watch any YouTube videos, there's so much, Sir Perfluous or that's not even the word I'm looking for. There's so much praise for this computer right now because it runs the way an iPad runs, which is cool. The battery lasts for 20 to 22 hours and it's fast. It's bizarrely fast for something that costs, it's so affordable. I got the very base $1,000 model with eight gigs of memory. And unless you're a mega power user, that would normally be, you know, barely cutting it for multitasking in Chrome, but this computer has no problem multitasking, running video editing, audio editing, all that kind of stuff on just eight gigs of memory. It is quite remarkable. So anyway, that's my little M1 spiel, pretty amazing little machine. Again, I mentioned the Mac and iOS for VO Facebook group. If that's a place you want to hang out. There's a new community for you. A little thing I went through recently was trying to use Zoom and Apollo so that the audio coming back from you, the Zoom user, if you're the remote end and somebody else is coaching you or directing you, sounds good. Zoom does a really weird thing where it doubles up the audio internally inside the console. So it's sending out the original audio from the mic and a second copy of audio. That's the monitor mix and it's really annoying. So in anybody out there having that issue where someone says, you sound like you're in a tube or you sound weird, just simply mute the microphone on channel one in your console. Just clicked mute so that the microphone isn't feeding into the monitor mix and the problem is solved. Yes, you will no longer hear yourself and that's okay. You shouldn't be listening to yourself anyway. Excellent point. This works. Lastly, a little mini rant. Whenever I do a remote support call with somebody using Zoom that's on Windows, why does it never go that well? Dan, have you noticed this? Their audio is kind of glitchy. There's always a long latency or delay. Have you noticed this, Dan? Occasionally, if someone's on a Windows, sometimes it's a bandwidth issue. It's like, why is this person fading in and out? Why are they having trouble? Generally, they're not Mac people. Yeah, I don't know if it's a specific audio driver issue, something that's conflicting, but it happens a lot. It's so often that whenever someone shows up on my screen and it's a Windows system, I'm like, this isn't going to go well. I don't really have much to say about it. It's just a mini rant, but I wish we could figure out a way to make Windows work as smoothly and pain-free as things do in the Mac environment. Then I wouldn't be so hard on the Windows systems and the people that use them because they create so much more stress and troubleshooting issues for the rest of us. Anyway, that's it for me. Hardly a rant. Let's head on to the front end. Mini micro rant. It is a micro rant. It says mini rant, but I'll take micro rant. It's not an also rant. We limited my rant, so now let's talk about dynamics limiting. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to talk about, do you need a limiter? Now, a lot of people say, I want to get a limiter. Look what I just got. Did you get a limiter? No, I got fuzzy cat slippers. Christmas a little early? Thanks, honey. You're celebrating Hanukkah early. Sorry. Anyway, so what is a limiter? Well, we've talked about setting levels and why you need to get your level set right. Some people can be very, very dynamic in their reads. So, especially in audiobooks, and I think we find this more in audiobook production, more than anything else, people using a limiter because they're like, I don't want to have to worry about my levels. I want to be able to get loud. I want to be able to talk. I don't want to over modulate. I don't use a limiter, even in post. If my levels are set right, after a while, once you get really used to being, you know, doing voice acting and really are comfortable with using a microphone, you will find that the best way to control your volume is more with proximity than it is with gain, unless you have, say, your interface right in front of you and you know you're going to be doing some loud passages, especially you guys doing game voices out there because we get this a lot where people are like, well, there's going to be yelling, and then there's going to be soft stuff. How do I, you know, what do I do? Well, one is is you can turn your head because we don't yell into people's ears. We tend to be farther away when we yell at people, which is why we're yelling at them in the first place because they're not right next to us. Or we're just really ticked off at them. And in gaming, generally, it's because you're really ticked off at somebody because you're holding a sword or a harpoon. A kill or a laser or a hand grenade or something along those lines. But if you have a couple of choices, one, if you have the interface right in front of you, you can turn it down. Or if you look at the script ahead of time, record the soft stuff first and then record the loud stuff second so you can turn the game down and then just cut and paste stuff back where it belongs in the order of the script, which is a lot simpler. And you'll notice I said, do the soft stuff first because the loud stuff tends to wear out your voice a little bit. So if you start off and warm up with the soft stuff and then do the loud stuff, then your voice isn't going to get fried at the end of the session. What do you think about that? That's a good point. These are very like real world practical, non-tech ways of doing this. Right. Which is very practical. I've been hearing video game producers telling my clients that record at really low levels. And that normally would seem odd. You're going to see levels that look really way lower than you would normally want to see. We normally like to see peaks minus six to minus four. And they're saying, no, peaks at minus 18 is fine. So what they're basically doing is kind of tricking you into setting your gain way lower and giving yourself a huge amount of headroom to allow for the errant spike from that character, that shout or that shriek or whatever it is, to never even approach clipping. There are very few, but there are a handful, and I literally mean a handful because there's one in my hand right now, of preamps that do have a limiter function built in. And I'm so on the fence about this, right? Because on the one hand, set your gain correctly. You never need to worry about a limiter. But if it's kind of a high pressure situation. I don't know if you're like doing a lot of stuff over source connect or if there's clients on the line or if it's a group read and you just don't want to have to be so worried about it. Having something with a limiter built in actually on this at the switches on the bottom. On the Micport Pro 2. Could be nice. Just the thing about it is don't lean on it. It should not be something that you're constantly slamming into the limiter, right? So still set your gain correctly. But it's just a nice little extra thing to protect that wave that take from being thrown out because it over modulated. Yeah, I think a lot of that may go actually to the podcasting people. So that they're able to maintain a consistent level. Because doing podcasting is really very different from doing voiceover because... It's essentially live, right? Yeah, I mean some people do a lot of post and edit the crap out of their shows and then that's a type of podcasting. But if you're especially interviewing people or you have people doing something live, it's hard to retake that again. So that is definitely where the limiter is really helpful. Anything that you don't want to do is another take. Yeah, now our good friend David H. Lawrence the 17th has a product out that he's advertising with us. And it's called Audio Cupcake, which we have both tried. And your thoughts on it? It does what it says on the tin. Right. Meaning it takes your audio and makes sure that it lands in the targeted RMS range that's required by common audio book production standards. So that's between an RMS level or average of minus 23 and minus 18. And it will also correct your peak levels so they never go past minus 3. And you know, it's very clever. It's a drag and drop process. You literally can drag a whole folder worth of your chapters. And it will do that for you. And it automates a process that was once being done by... What's the tool that sort of sunsetted with the new Macs that you can't use anymore? Levelator? Yes, that's why he invented Audio Cupcake. Right. And it takes place of that. But I think it maybe does a better job because it's not as heavy-handed. Right. And that's where I mentioned what it doesn't do, right? So, Levelator had this like gain-writing tool in it so if your levels were all over the map, let's say it was an interview and one person was low and one was loud, Levelator had a way of trying to correct for that. Audio Cupcake won't do that. And that's, to me, a pro. I don't want to automate everything about my final sound. I want to have control over... I want to make sure that, you know, I'm doing the right thing up front. I want to make sure that my level levels is matched as well as I can because, you know, I'm going to get a predictable result and I'm just... It's just better technique. Yeah. So, it's not going to fix crazy levels. You still need to have good technique, consistent levels, good mic placement. You also have to have a good sounding room and good EQ. If you're overly harsh or really sibilant or boomy, it's not going to correct for that either. Proper gear setup, proper gain settings, you know, getting a nice setup for your mastering. It's just a really awesome way to quickly finish off your audio book and get it ready for publication. Right. And David makes no bones about it. It really is for, you know, keeping with ACX and Audible standards and for, you know, some of the podcast platforms because... And he says, you know, it's really for that, not necessarily for voiceover, depending on the type of voiceover work you do. And as opposed to a limiter, which we were just talking about, which is a front-end processor that is controlling that which you do as you are recording, this is a post-processor, something that you have control of at the other end. So if you don't like it, you can change it back. Right. You're going to drag all your finished files into this system and it's going to make another copy. So you can audition the copy and make sure it sounds the way expected to and you're not stuck with it. But with an input recording, input dynamic limiter, like a limiter on the input stage or on the compressor stage, on the input, if that's not set right, you're stuck with it and it may not sound good. That's right. And that's right. And it creates several copies of the files in different settings. That's right. It does. It actually, in the pro or the advanced version, I think I can't remember if it's called pro version. Yeah. The paid version, it will actually make several copies of the audio in different stages because the software is doing multiple stages to your audio. So it's pretty interesting. You can kind of use it as a way to kind of analyze, more be analytical about your audio and learn how these tools actually work because you can hear it now. Here's what it sounds like when the limiter is applied and here's what it sounds like when it's been normalized, et cetera, et cetera. Absolutely. Very cool little program. It makes all the difference. And you can find that at audiocupcake.com. Gee, that was an easy URL to find. Anyway, we got lots of questions from you kids coming up. So let's get to those in just a couple of minutes. But first, let's take a break and let's hear from some of our wonderful sponsors. We'll be right back. In World of Voices, one place wasn't VO Buzz Weekly. Voice over body shop, the better one. In these modern times, every business needs a website. When you need a website for your voice acting business, there's only one place to go. Like the name says, voiceactorwebsites.com. Their experience in this niche webmaster market gives them the ability to quickly and easily get you from concept to live online in a much shorter time. When you contact voiceactorwebsites.com, their team of experts and designers really get to know you and what your needs are. They work with you to highlight what you do. Then they create an easily navigable website for your potential clients to get the big picture of who you are and how your voice is the one for them. Plus, voiceactorwebsites.com has other great resources like their practice script library and other resources to help your voice over career flourish. Don't try it yourself, go with the pros. Voiceactorwebsites.com, where your via website shouldn't be a pain in the, you know what. Hey everybody, it's that time of the show where we get to talk about our fantastic, wonderful, amazing sponsors, source elements, the creators of Source Connect. At this point, you have to know what Source Connect is. My gosh, all the agents are nagging you to get it. Even if you don't have an agent, maybe consider having it ready to go so when you're asked for it, you can say yes. And what does that mean? You go to source-elements.com, get a 15-day free trial, but you can even wait to activate your trial. You can sign up, get your account going, get your iLock account set up, have all the pieces in place and then wait to activate your 15-day free trial to make sure that it doesn't expire by the time you need it. But it gets better than that. If you have had your 15-day free trial and you let it expire, don't worry, there's now two-day passes. So you can activate your Source Connect for just that gig and just basically pay for the time you actually need. So you really can't go wrong. There's no major commitments anymore, no subscriptions. If you don't want to go that route, you do have that ability to just activate it and use it for a day or two. So it's a no-brainer. Be ready to use Source Connect for that big gig that comes down the line, which is happening more and more these days thanks to working remotely. And sign up at Source-Elements. And if you have a chance to tell them we sent you, would you do that? That'd be awesome. I'll be right back right after this. 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You're enjoying Dan and George on the VoiceOver Body Shop. We're back here at VoiceOver Body Shop. One of the things we love to do more than anything else is talk to other voice actors and answer their questions because boy, you guys got a lot of questions. Of course we haven't been able to do this at all in the last eight months is actually go to social events and meet up with other people and stuff. But we've been able to do webinars and one-on-one sessions and stuff. But we love getting questions. And if you have a question for us, throw it in the chat room right now in Facebook and Jeff Holman is there and he will get that to us. We've got a bunch of questions already. But also if you come up with a question in the middle of the week after you're like watching, maybe you're watching the show and replay, you can write to us at theguysatvobs.tv and say, here's my question. And we've got a bunch of those this week. People are writing in, hey, I got a question for you. Sweet. Let's jump into those questions now. Starting off with Dwayne de Salvo. Dwayne says, love your program as always. I've held off upgrading to Catalina from Mojave because I guess if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But now the system wants to upgrade to Big Sur, which of course I wouldn't do until the dust is settled as George constantly recommends. Is there any benefit to my upgrading to Catalina now versus waiting until Big Sur is good to go with audacity and focus right and the other devices I'm using? Many thanks. Okay, yeah. So there becomes this point where you're now two OSs behind, right? You didn't make the leap to Catalina and one year later, here comes Big Sur right on its heels and you're thinking, well, now should I go to Catalina and then to Big Sur? That's a good question. I don't really know the answer. The reason I go to Catalina, if you're already running Mojave and it's rock solid, reliable, and it's doing everything you need it to do, there are so few new things in Catalina that are going to make your life better that it's just not worth making these once a year incremental updates, in my opinion. What makes it hard is deciding when to make a bigger leap going like some people are still in high Sierra. Should I go up to Mojave or should I go up to Catalina? And it just comes down to a certain point where things just don't work. Everything is not working well anymore because your system is getting too old. That takes like three to five years before running an old OS or something really starts to in any way impede your work. And at that point, then consider it. But yeah, I don't think there's any strong argument to make that upgrade to Catalina just because it's now, as I call it, fully baked and finished. I don't think there's a good reason to do it. And it's also more annoying. Catalina has so many nag windows and permissions and it's just annoying OS to use. That's been my experience. So I just stick with what's working. Well, yeah, that's always my thought. It's like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. How much of a change is Big Sur going to be? Obviously, everything's got to work with it and not all vendors have their stuff that's going to match up with Big Sur, right? The thing that really cut you off with the knees when you go to Catalina is it's the first OS where they've completely burned the bridges of old legacy software. So when you go to Catalina, you can no longer run any 32-bit software. And if you don't know what's running for 32-bit on your machine, do a little Googling which apps are 32-bit and you'll see how to find out very quickly. But you'll be surprised when you do that upgrade to Catalina that there might be something you forgot that you used or something that's down on your dock that just no longer is there or works. You'll have a little app with a line through it or something. Maybe you're running Microsoft Office 2008 or something like that and all of a sudden, you just don't have it anymore because you went to Catalina. So that would be another reason to avoid it. But to go to Big Sur, I don't know. There's just new features. There's a new graphic design which a lot of people think is really ugly. I don't think it's all that great myself. There's some new bells and whistles but really it's rare that there's a new, new thing you just got to, got to have to be productive as a voice actor running your own studio. There's rarely anything that's a game changer. Yeah. I'm sure the guys up in Cupertino are sitting there going, eh, they'll get used to it. Oh, absolutely. Wall, wall go, eh, I don't like the new color design and six months later. You know, I mean, there's a reason why people still use Windows. They want to customize. They hate a company telling them the way to do it or what to do, what, you know, what computer to own, you know, and there's a reason that Windows, other than the fact that it's in every government building, every hospital, every corporate office, every bank, there's a reason it's still popular among a subset of folks out there. They want customization. That's, you know, Apple's not as much about that. It's more about reliability and consistency. Right. And 10 voice actors, that's pretty important. Yeah. Question from our good friend, Dr. Nathan Carlson. Go for it. Speaking of reliable and consistent. Yeah. Uh, says, George knows when I got my studio, he designed and installed it in 2014. Oh, I have to remember when it happened in 2014. Yeah. Other than a couple of mic cables needing replacement, it's worked like a charm since. I want to get an M1 Mac Mini to increase speed of audio processing and rendering video. But I don't want to break my studio. I have an Apollo twin solo interface. I'm getting fed up with how slow my old Mac Mini 2014 is running, even with constantly optimizing and keeping it clean. Should I just buy the new M1 Mac Mini and replace the UA product with a different brand or a simpler interface? He's a doctor. He can afford to do this. You've demonstrated to an extent that the exact interface used doesn't matter much. Any informed guesses on how long we'll have to wait for Apollo interfaces to work with the new Apple operating system? Patience is running just a little thin here. Actually, I have no idea when Apollo will approve Big Sur. I don't think it's that computer. I don't think it's Silicon, even. That's the main problem. Although this is total conjecture. It's more the operating system. When I tried to actually install the Apollo console, console software on the new Mac Mini, it didn't say, oh, you're on it. Oh, my MacBook Air. It didn't say you're on it on a Silicon Mac. Sorry, no can do. It said, you're on Big Sur. Sorry, no can do. And I've had no problem running software that's not written for the new M1 chip, not Intel, but the new one, because the Mac has no problem transcoding or translating the old code into the new Silicon compatible code. So I don't know what's stopping them other than they just haven't had the time to put it through its paces and guarantee it's going to be stable. And I have no idea how long it's going to be. And I totally feel your pain, Nathan. I know you're right on that cusp. And there's a lot of folks out there like you. For you, your Apollo is, it's an important part of your chain. You do have some processing on your Apollo that is in there to ease your production flow a bit. And you will lose that with, you know, almost any other interface. So you'd have to adapt to that. But it may not be that big a deal, because if you're doing everything in post and twisted wave anyway, then so what? Just apply it later. It's not a big deal. So then you could use a new interface. I do understand that the SSL2 USB interface works on Big Sur. And it should work on the M1 Mac Mini as well. But whatever you're going to do, you're going to be pretty much a pioneer. You're going to have to expect to be stumbling into some issues. So if you're not already in the Mac and iOS 4 VO Facebook group that I created, you definitely should be in there and chat up some of the folks who did take the plunge already and are starting to test things out. So that would be a good place for you to hang out and find out. I get it, Nathan. I understand the patience issue. Totally. Pamela, your R has essentially the same question as she's saying, should I buy the new Mac Mini now? Or do you recommend buying the 2018 instead, which is strangely more money if you're going to get a new Mac Mini? It is strangely more money. Like if I was going to buy a Mac Mini today, I would be very hard pressed to want to buy even a used or refurbished 2018, which is the one I have, by the way, because they're still selling for more than the new Mac Mini M1, which is ludicrous. It's bizarre. But yeah, you're going to have to do your research. Go on that Facebook group, chat to folks about who has used what their experiences have been. It's extremely early days. My buddy Sean on there, he has a Mac Mini. He's putting it through its paces. He's finding out some gotchas. There's a ton of YouTubers out there putting it through its paces, but very few people I've seen on YouTube are audio producers. And most of them are using Apple software, like Final Cut, or what's the logic? They're using Apple-centric software. So you're going to be a little bit more out there in the weeds if you're not using stuff that's been approved or created by Apple. So I don't have a good answer for you, Pamela. There is always a 14-day return policy on these things. So get the 699 Mac Mini, install your stuff that you need to get work done, and call it a science experiment. And then let us know how it goes. We see smoke coming out of the phone. We'll know what happened. Jeff Holman, our intrepid chat room monitor, says, please explain how software can work with Big Sur, but still not work natively on the new Apple M1 chip. Why do we need Rosetta 2? What is Rosetta 2? Explain. This is turning really geeky. I knew this was going to happen. I'm sorry, I apologize. And I won't dawdle too long. So what Rosetta does is it's a translation app. The very first time you install, let's say, Adobe Audition, for example. Adobe Audition is an app that was designed to run on an Intel chip Mac. The architecture, I don't even know enough to explain why there is a different architecture to run software on Intel versus the M1. I don't know enough about that. But I do know that the software has to be translated. So the first time you install something that was not written for the silicon chip, it will make you install Rosetta. It happens very quickly. And then after that, Rosetta, when you install new apps, translates a code to run on the silicon machine. And it's amazingly effective. And it works very, very well. Like I said, I've run all these apps that were not written for silicon to run fine. But there are still systems that are saying we can't support Big Sur. And so it's a conundrum. Like I just said about the Apollo, I feel very confident that if I could get through that step where it says won't run on Big Sur, it may actually run on Big Sur. In fact, my friend Tim Freelander over at Soundbox did run it on Big Sur because he already had it installed. So he upgraded the computer to Big Sur. And it was working with some glitches. And if you want to know what those are, go to the, there's an Apollo, another group I made, the Universal Audio Apollo for VO Group on Facebook. You can go on there and chat with him about his experience of running it on Big Sur. But yeah, it's a weird conundrum right now. We're not only going to a new OS, we're going to a new hardware, a new infrastructure inside the computer. So we have to kind of wait and see on some of these cases of what's going to happen. Yeah. This Rosetta sounds like the NCAS system on the 737 Max. You know. Oh yeah, it'll solve all these problems. Yeah. I mean, it's solving a lot of problems until it doesn't. And that's why we're so cautious about going out and putting this into your production workflow. Okay. Why don't you get this one from J. Horace Black? He says, hey, great to see you two once again. Thanks, man. My question has to do with your stacks. Will you explain what the stacks you customize do? All right. Well, it's a multi-part question, so I'll answer that. So when I make a stack, it's so that your auditions, mostly auditions here, sound more familiar. So like when they're listening to it, listen to it back by the client and they're hearing your voice over with that processing on it. It sounds to them like it was really on television and they'll hopefully make you sound more sellable. It's kind of like putting on the right clothes for the job or, you know, a brand new suit for whatever the job is. It's kind of like just showing up best dressed or wearing the right makeup. It's kind of how I think of it. That's what they're for. I do them for every genre you can imagine. Their processing is going to be different based on the genre you're doing and it's completely subjective. There's no like, this is the way I do it for this is just, I just go with my gut and my ear and what sounds right to me based on my experience and hearing thousands of you guys do this stuff. Oh, there's a Cyber Monday deal that by the time you guys are probably hearing this, it's already passed. Oh, give it to them anyway. It was at GeorgeTheTechSale.com and basically there you can get stacks for a discount price of $42 instead of $75. And the stack thing I mentioned earlier is not a replacement, nor is cupcake a replacement for stacks. Audio cupcake and levelator just do a finalization of the audio to make sure it falls into a certain dynamic range for podcasts, for audio books and stuff like that. The stack has a lot more nuance, very custom-shaped EQ to match your mic and your voice and your booth, maybe an expander to reduce the room tone that's been set exactly right for your situation. Things like that are going to be in a stack that those other tools, well cupcakes specifically do not correct for. So I hope that answers that question. Okay. Amy Hutchins asks, I have a Studio Bricks one, not the VO edition. What's the best way to tune up the interior for audio books? Well, I guess that really depends on what does it sound like? Because again, as you were just saying, it's every voice is different. Every room is different. Now a Studio Bricks is going to be somewhat consistent in its acoustics and stuff. But what are some of the things that you could do to make it audio book friendly? Well, again, we have to hear it. It might be just fine. If you're using your mic right and you're setting your levels right, if the acoustics in the booth, she says it's not a voiceover edition. What's the difference between the voiceover edition and say just a Studio Bricks? I believe the voiceover edition just adds a whole bunch of cool accessories, like a really nice mic arm and a shelf copy holder, things like that. Nothing acoustic. I don't believe there's any acoustical change in the VO edition. Maybe they throw in a bass trap or something. I can't recall. But it's not about the acoustics. It's more about the accessories. So if you have a question about that, send us some audio. Let's hear what it sounds like raw. And then we can determine if there's any adjustments you need to make in there. This booth does this and sounds like this, making absolutely nothing with your voice, with your mic and that booth. Because everything is totally individual. So we really need to hear that. Yeah. I mean, just a general rule of thumb. I do find that if you have that big piece of glass in the door next to you, try to don't get too relaxed on your mic placement. Don't get too far away. You're going to get glass bounce. That's going to come back into that mic and you're going to sound pretty distant very quickly. So be very careful with your proximity. Don't get too far away too quickly. That's just a general rule. Right. In a small booth. In any small booth. Right. Especially one with a big piece of glass. Yes. Next to you. That's true. This is an interesting question from Vince Falcon. Can you discuss or review the stellar brand of microphones in Tech Talk? I know your view of them was not very stellar in the beginning. Just wondering if you still have the same feelings about them. Why not give them a fair shake? Now, the Stelt now they make a bunch of different types of mics, but they make a $199 regular studio tube condenser mic. You know, it sounds like a studio condenser mic. I generally know it could be that because I'm old and can't hear a darn thing anymore that I can't really tell the difference between any microphones. But is this microphone going to be the difference between you booking work and not booking work? I don't believe that. Only if you're starting off with an SM7B maybe. Well, yes. Don't get an SM7B. Which is the mic you have now. Right. Then going to the stellar is probably going to be a good choice. Brain improvement. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, there's a lot of other studio condenser mics out there. My general opinion is if it's more than $150 or somewhere around $200, it's probably fine. Because if there's any adjustments that need to be made to it with a mic of that quality, you can generally make it sound like just about anything. But if you've got something like you were saying, an SM7B or an RE20, which is a dynamic mic, it's a totally different sound. Most studio condenser mics sound fairly similar. I know we're going long here. But this is an opportunity for another micro rant. The reason this microphone you know about it is because they did a very common marketing method that's being used these days, which is send them out to all of the top viewed, top subscribed, top liked YouTube bloggers. Get them in their hands and let them talk about it. It's extremely effective. And that's the reason you know anything about this microphone is that's what they did. The company sent them out to a ton of bloggers like our good friend Mike DelGaudio, Booth Chunky, right? And why do we not have one? I don't know. We probably don't even tick on the... If you look at our videos and we look at our YouTube, we've got a couple thousand subscribers. I think maybe we had like 1,400 or are we at 4,000? I'm losing track. But we get 10,000 views a month. Yeah, but in the terms of the grand scheme of things, we're still like under the radar in terms of being a big time vlogger. I'll occasionally get an email from some small Chinese company. Will you test out our $20 lav mic? I've got that. No thanks. Sorry. Anyway, I guess if we had them in the studio to try out and give them a fair shake, we would. It's rare we go buy anything just to test them. Right. The MacBook is one of those rare, rare occasions where I buy something specifically to test it. But most of it's because we try everything that our clients are using. So we get to try it and hear it in context of the actual user. We don't do a lot of just straight-up gear reviews because it's kind of a waste of time. I mean, I've done a few, and I've appreciated companies that have sent us things to test. I'm not going to stop doing it, but it's not how we make our living. It's not how we help the community. It's just reviewing a product. We use what we are in our community find successful and what we have had good experience with. We deal with companies that back their products, have incredibly good customer support. And that's what's important to us. So that's the only reason. We just haven't had them in the studio yet. Right. We've had relationships with the higher-ups at some of these companies. Yeah, of course. Or the mid-level higher-ups. Yeah. I reviewed a mic that only is probably known because of direct marketing to the top brass of VoiceOver, the Vanguard V4. Right. And I had to send it back. I didn't get to keep it. And I wish I had it. It's a freaking fantastic microphone. It's so good that you can't get one. They can't make them fast enough. I've referred it to a bunch of people and they're like, they're just not in stock. I can't get one anywhere. Yeah. So that's the double-edged sword of all this stuff. That's true. One more quick question here from Pamela Urar as the earlier says, if the furnace and fridge are your only noise issues, do you need to be fully surrounded by sound treatments or just need a few sound panels? I hear the halo is not that helpful only for isolating from instruments. This is a confusing thing. There's a difference between sound treatment to prevent reverberation and sound proofing and none of these things are going to stop sound from coming near your microphone. Especially the hum or rumble of a first. Or a buzz, depending on. Or a buzz, yeah. Whatever that is. None of that stuff is going to help. So your idea of using less stuff to deal with a simple noise is, it's a sound theory, but they're not related at all. It's just, it depends on the sound, the tonal frequency, the intensity, all those things. And almost there is nothing you're going to glue, hang, staple, spray, stick. Sound breaks right through. In your studio that's going to stop noises like that. So those are your only, if those are literally your only two noise problems, catch the blessings. That's pretty darn good. And the furnace, you might be cold for a while, but you can turn it off. The fridge, those can be turned off for hours at a time. As long as you don't keep opening them, they'll keep your food cold. So there are things you can do. As I would tell my wife, every time she would walk into our house in Buffalo, whether it be summer or winter, why is it so cold in here? Why is it so warm in here? Because I'm making money and saving money at the same time. So anyway, well, great questions, kids. That's great. Thank you. We love getting your questions. If you have a question for us while you're listening to the show right now, maybe sometime during the week, write to us at TheGuysAtVOBS.tv. And your question can be read not on the air, but over the internet, whatever it is we call this. It's kind of narrow casting. Anyway, that's all for the questions, but George and I will be right back after this break to wrap things up for you. Hello. Welcome to Voice Over Body Shop. It's a place where you can get your body shopped with voices. Come on. Look at Dan's head. So shiny. Well, hello there. I bet you weren't expecting to hear some big-voiced announcer guy on your new orientation training for Snapchat, were you? Stick around. You don't want to miss this. Power 1039. At Target, we want you to come as you are. Be comfortable. Okay, maybe not. Bathrobe comfortable. Pants for the customer on aisle four, please. Nuevo Mexico necesita un cambio. La representante Michelle Lujan Grisham ha luchado por nuestro estado en la Cámara de Representantes. Watch anywhere, anytime on an unlimited number of devices. Sign in with your Netflix account to watch instantly at Netflix.com. The ice cream maker is a big risk that can have huge reward until you forget to turn it on. That's it, guys. Time is up. Audio book and podcast audio files that meet the technical standards of ACX, Audible, Findaway, and all podcast platforms. The free version of Audio Cupcake does just what Levelator does. RMS normalization and compression ready to be post-processed in your sound software. Unlock the premium version and Audio Cupcake finishes the job by peak normalizing your wave files to minus 3 dB and outputting them as 192K MP3s ready to upload immediately. No more post-mastering. You're mastering. It's a huge time-saver. Download Audio Cupcake for free at AudioCupcake.com. That's AudioCupcake.com. Oh, hi. You know, if you live in a house and your voiceover studio is in that house, you don't want to disturb everybody else who's living in there. So what you need are good headphones that are made specifically for voiceover. And that's why we have Harlan Hogan's signature series Voice Optimized Headphones 2.0. What's so great about these? Well, one, they have a very flat response. So you only hear exactly what it is you sound like. Second, incredibly comfortable. Letter pads on the outside filled with memory foam. A really comfortable headband that really... It really works with your head. The most important thing, you can wear them for long periods of time. That's really important. Where do you get them? Only at VoiceOverEssentials.com. That's VoiceOverEssentials.com. Just go there, look at the headphones and get them now. Tell them we sent you. Thanks, Harlan. Yeah, hi. This is Carlos Ellis Rocky, the voice of Rocco. And you're watching VoiceOver Body Shop. Wearing my Harlan Hogan headphones as we speak. Because I had to wear headphones tonight for some reason. Because we're still working out some of the monitoring. See, when Sue's not here and she's in Burbank and we're trying to route audio all over Southern California here. The audio is always the hardest part of this show. Believe it or not, yeah. But we're working on it. But at least it sounds good now. And if it sounds good, it is good. Hopefully. All right. So, who are our donors of the week? And there are quite a few. Yes. Let's see how well I read them this week. We have Philip Sapir. Trey speaks for you. Shelly Avelino. Natasha. Or Shevka. My Chevka. It's more Chevka. My Chevka. Boy, that is my... I'm so sorry, Natasha. We're going to have a good laugh about that one when we have lunch. Yeah. Thank you. I got the V part. I keep saying Marchevka. It's Marchevka. Natasha Marchevka. Bing. George Wittem. That's my dad. And it's not Whitman, so don't read it that way. Rob Rader. Diana Birdsell. Stephanie Sutherland. Antland Productions. Dwayne DeSalvo. Mike Gordon. Steven Chandler. Martha Kahn. And Don Griffith. Our all donors to our show. And almost every one of those names I've written, I've read many times poorly. Yeah. And it's because they subscribe. And you know, it's just a way to keep your name fresh in our minds and our hearts. And hey, you never know when someone says, yeah, you know, it's funny. I heard that guy's name on the show. We should hire him. Okay, maybe that never happens. But if it does, let us know. It couldn't height. But it's great. We really appreciate your donations to the show because, look, we try to bring you fresh content. Every week, maybe, you know, 45 weeks out of the year. We don't take that much time off. So, but we will on the 28th. When I turn 64. Oh, yeah. Anyway, we need to thank our sponsors as well, like Harlan Hogan's Voice Over Essentials. Voice Over Extra. Source Elements. VioHeroes.com. VoiceActorWebsites.com. And JMCDemos. All right. Thanks again to Jeff Holman for doing a great job in the chat room getting those questions to us. Sue Merlino, who's in her garage in Burbank, getting this done or wherever it is she is, wherever her dog was barking. And does a great job with that. And Lee Penny for being Lee Penny. Well, that's going to do it for us this week. We'll see you in a couple of weeks with, well, we'll see you next week with another great guest and more tech talk. And that's why we're here to help you with your Home Voice Over Studio. So join us every week here at Voice Over Body Shop. But remember, if it sounds good. It is good. And that's all that matters. I'm Dan Leonard. I'm George Whitton. And this is Voice Over. Body Shop. Or V-O-B-S. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. Tech Talk. 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