Audio recordings from the 2022 Howard Days sessions are now being posted on the blog of The Cromcast: A Weird Fiction Podcast. Donations for future annual Howard Days events are always welcome, if you enjoy them. Eight so far, as posts:
* The REH Influence on Gaming.
* Robert E. Howard in the year 1932.
* The Glenn Lord Symposium. Three papers and panel.
* Guest of Honour speech at The Robert E. Howard Celebration Banquet.
* Late Night ‘In Conversation’ at the Pavilion, Cross Plains.
* Conan the Barbarian at 40. (Reminiscences of making the first two Conan movies).
* Rusty and Shelly Burke at the Cross Plains Public Library.
* What’s Up with REH? (Latest developments in Howard’s characters, in publishing and entertainment). Wrong media is linked on the post. The required audio is here. Some of the reveals: A “Red Nails” prequel novel by a top writer, The Blood of Serpent, as the first big ‘splash’ release in October 2022 to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Conan. Sounds good, as long as the action sounds like Howard. And a big sumptuous Conan artbook. Also a new monthly Titan Conan comic-book with top talent, to be released around the same back-to-uni time, now that Disney/Marvel has thrown the character overboard.
* A Chat with Matt John of Rogues in the House games podcast
Beware the Creative Commons licences, which are muddled. On the blog posts the audio is all very usefully placed under full Creative Commons Attribution. However, the licence is regrettably different on the Archive.org mirror-copies, adding the show-stopper of “No Derivatives”.
Lots of ‘bathroom’ echo on the main speaker’s audio for “What’s Up with REH?”, so I used it as a test-file for the Izotope RX 7 AI-powered audio repair software — which for months now I have been meaning to get around to installing and testing. Specifically for its ‘Dialogue De-reverb’ module. Works fine. I applied this preset on the standard ‘General Reduction’ preset, and after 25 minutes of re-rendering the audio and three minutes of saving the file I had a much more listenable version. This version is now on Archive.org and, though it’s a ‘derivative’ I’ve assumed the blog’s original CC Attribution licence applies.
