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Introduction
It is a well known fact of the world that there are mostly benign monsters everywhere. To observe these our team of researchers created many podfics, which you can find in the VoiceTeam collection, and kept their eyes open to find the ones drawn to them when podficcing.
We hope this manual will help you deal with the many monsters you can find when creating a podfic!
Please remember that these monsters manifest in different ways to everyone, and the images shown are merely approximations created by the person who found the monster.
Monsters do not tend to photograph well.
HMMMzzz
The Monster of Background Noise
Possibly the most common of the monsters, HMMMzzz will be in every recording, sometimes as a subtle, tiny buzz and other times nearly drowning out your voice.
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There’s many ways to minimize the attacks of this monster, from improving your recording environment, to running a Noise Reduction effect when you are editing. Soon you will learn, that no podfic is the same without HMMMzzz, and it is good to accept xim to give ambience to your podfic.
Klickety Klack
The Click Monster
Klickety Klack does sneak attacks when you are in the middle of speaking. It can be distracting to the listener if it is a severe attack.
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While you can erase these clicks during editing, it can be a complicated process, but if you get familiar with your De-Clicker plug-in, it can go a lot more smoothly.
Outsidus Loud
The Monster of outdoor noises
Outsidus is the monster that summons traffic sirens the moment you sit down to record. It wakes up birds that sound louder when you are in front of your mic, and notifies all the neighborhood children that it is time to play.
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Take a deep breath and wait for the noises to quiet down, and then start to record.
Inaudible Spike
The Monster of noiseless waveform spikes
Inaudible Spike appears when you get to editing. While recording, everything was silent and fine, but now everything in the waveform is spikey.
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This is due to the noise being on the lower frequencies, but with Spectral Editing and a bit of tenacity, you can manage it.
Humming Menace
The Monster that hums inside your fridge
The humming menace is a tiny monster, it likes to crawl into any appliances that are powered on and humm happily while eating the electricity they run on. The hum is never quite the same, which can make editing them a troublesome feat.
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Running a Notch Filter at the right frequency can help erase their presence, but if you do that too much it might make you sound strange!
Greebles
The Monster only cats can see
Greebles appears… sometimes. You’ll never quite know when, because sometimes your cat may just stare at Greebles, letting you know this monster is there with a vacant gaze. But sometimes, Greebles will tease your cats, enticing them into zooming around.
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There are many ways to deal with Greebles. You can try setting your cats further away from your recording space, but then you might have to deal with Insidus/Outsidus instead.
Loocius Cableus
The Monster of bad connections
Likes to team-up with Rando Defaultia to cause previously functioning equipment to suddenly stop working. This monster is not believed to be malicious, but is easily influenced by their trouble-making friend.
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When your microphone starts dropping sound or picking up static, always remember the golden rule: check the hardware first.
Rando Defaultia
The Monster of weird resets
Sneakily switches your input device to the wrong microphone, your output device to your microphone with no speakers, and turns off the sync-lock on your label tracks. Close allies with Loocius Cableus, they team up to subtly deactivate and reactivate everything!
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Try rescanning audio devices to bring your devices back from the abyss!
Water Dragon
The Monster of plumbing noises
This monster slips and slides through the pipes of your home, turning on showers and flushing toilets as you try to record.
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Little can be done to avoid a Water Dragon, unless you are a hermit, living alone on an otherwise deserted island. In which case, watch out for the Ancient Water Dragon, monster of thunderstorms.
Pronuncius Nonsensicus
AKA: Twistius Toungtiedical,The Monster of mangled words
Somehow able to change sounds as they travel from your brain to your mouth, this devious monster can cause an ordinary string of words to smush together into an incomprehensible blurgh, and place traps on the memory of how to say proper names.
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Patience is their greatest enemy. With the slowing of speech, judicious use of pronunciation guides, and the practice of multiple takes, you too can defeat the dreaded Pronuncius Nonsensicus.
Curtail Halt
Roommate Interruptions
This monster never goes after the podficcer directly, instead whispering into their cohabitants ear to Go Home at unusual times, disrupting the podficcers plans to record.
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The best defense against Curtail is to talk with your roommate about how you want the place to yourself for a while.
Insidius/Outsidius
The monster that insists the door must be open
The moment you begin to record, Insidius/Outsidius slots itself over any closed doors in the recording studio and mimics the sounds of beloved family pets, who would of course be too well behaved to do this, and whines for the closed door to be opened. It doesn't matter if the pet is inside the studio or outside, Insidius/Outsidius insists that the door must be opened.
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Sorry to say, the only solution to this monster's noises is to stand up from your recording station and walk across the room to open the door and then close it again. This action is required approximately every 10 to 20 minutes. You can always edit out the sounds of your movement later, but the whines of Insidius/Outsidius are much more difficult to remove.
Phantom Blanky
The Schrödinger of Blanket Permission
Insedious and pityless, this monster erases blanket permission statements from creators' profiles and make you doubt they ever were there. If hungry, will also gnaw on blankets and leave giant conditional holes.
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HatcheT MauL
The monster that chops down your code.
This monster hides inside AO3 and waits for the moment you try to post your finished podfic to strike. Sometimes, the attack is fairy obvious, leaving your post blank or wonky looking. Other times detecting attacks can take effort, everything looks fine, but none of the links work.
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Luckily, it is fairly easy to edit again and fix it, but pay attention to your code so no mistake gets past you!
Fluctuatus Wordus
The Monster of rewrites
When you approach the text you are able to read it just fine. However, when you come back you will find that the Fluctuatus Wordus has already been there and changed what the words are. Words might have been added, removed or rearranged, you can be sure they are different.
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Pulmonic Occlusive
The Monster of plosive sounds.
Pulmonic Occlusive stays invisibly in front of the mic, and when a [p] or a [b] sound is made, it releases a puff of air, leaving behind a tiny explosive sound.
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To drive away this monster, you can try not speaking directly into your microphone, or acquiring a pop filter, either buying it, or making it.
A High-Pass Filter (80Hz 24dB) might also make them less prominent.
Grumbly Gremlin
The Monster of stomach growls
One of the most common types of domestic gremlin, the Grumbly can be found anywhere there are people who have neglected a meal. The Grumbly's growls are not overly intrusive, but they are often audible to a nearby person or sensitive microphone.
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The Grumbly can be temporarily pacified by a tasty snack, but is more likely to leave you in peace if provided with balanced meals at regular intervals. However, they have also been known to loudly complain when surprised with new and spicy foods. Don't be alarmed; a soothing beverage will probably help. For extreme cases, please offer your gremlin an antacid to ease their distress and avoid retribution.
Moe Lawn
The Monster of Active Neighbors
Everything is perfect, no one is home, there’s no rain falling, the fridge isn’t even making that weird hum you know your microphone picks up. You sit down to record, turn on your microphone and, as if magically timed, somewhere outside your neighbor starts to mow their lawn.
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Your only consolation is that a backyard is only so big. Moe Lawn can only dream of becoming as powerful as Jakk Hammer one day. Eventually, your neighbor will finish. Right?
Runalong Deraildium
The Monster of Sentence Structure
If you’ve ever read a sentence that went on and on and seemed to meander about (and who hasn’t, really, it’s quite unfortunately common and a sad state of affairs that sometimes what should be four or five sentences gets dog-piled into a single monster (so-called) sentence), diverting into almost unrelated threads and tangents until you’ve all but forgotten what the writer was even talking about at the beginning of this (should be a paragraph) statement, then you’ve already met this monster.
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In this situation, the podficcer is empowered to insert pauses as needed! Don’t hesitate to verbalize the text as if it were made up of the appropriate number of sentences.
Jack Hammer
The Monster of Construction Work
Unlike Moe Lawn, Jakk Hammer won’t wait for the perfect time to strike. Instead, they just seem to take over every hour of every day for days on end.
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Be patient, eventually, it will go away.
NomNoms Gremlin
The Monster of Disappearing Fics
Nomnoms loves to snack on your favorite fics. Ever known you had read the perfect fic to podfic and instead find endless results of fics that Do Not Match? Nomnoms is probably enjoying it just about now! Once Nomnoms gets its hands on it, it is very rare to find the fic again.
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Sometimes, if you persist, you might be able to find it, don’t lose hope! But for now… maybe look for a different fic. Breaks are good!