Category Archives: Podcasts etc.

Getting Heavy

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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For this Halloween, Are You Morbid? XXXVI: A Heavy Metal Podcast offered listeners “Lovecraft Returns”. This being a two-hour discussion survey of the best Lovecraft heavy metal music, which sports track titles such as “In the Maze of Kadath”.

This is a “part two”, though, and follows last year’s three-and-a-half hour Lovecraft-a-thon Are You Morbid? XV – Lovecraft & Metal: A Beginner’s Guide, with lots of expert discussion about the music and where to start. Skip to around the ten minute mark, to get past the usual basic “Who is Lovecraft?” intro for metal folk who’ve (somehow) never heard of him. For those who feel they may need to skip over certain sections, the links above go to listennotes.com. The “…” on the sidebar there opens up to offer an MP3 link, and if you then right-click on this your Web browser should be able to force an MP3 download.

In the case of “A Beginner’s Guide” the track-listing also categorises the tracks by metal type, for those who have not yet correlated the mind-bending differences between Symphonic Black and Blackened Drone/Sludge/Doom Metal.

Sadly there appears to be no Spotify playlist for these track selections, and so perhaps someone might want to spend time combining these two ‘Are You Morbid?’ Lovecraft lists into one. And then posting a link to the playlist. Possibly www.playlist-converter.net can help with that, as it appears to be able to take a plain-text band name – track name list and turn it into a Spotify playlist, though I don’t trust it enough to give it Spotify account access. I’ve partially cleaned the combined list for such a conversion, removing accents, type brackets, dual track names and sending the “Everything” bands to their own list…

BAND NAME | TRACK NAME

Olyphant – Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
Terrible Old Man – Cosmic Poems
Terrible Old Man – Fungai from Yuggoth
Back To R’leyh – The Awakening
Last Fight of the Primordial Revenant – Prophecies of a Dying World
Aldebaran – Dweller in the Twilight
Swampcult – The Festival
Fiendlord – Neuromancy
Ripping Corpse – Dreaming With the Dead
Nile – Those Who The Gods Detest
Septic Flesh – Sumerian Demons
Morbid Angel – Gateways to Annihilation
Infinite Spectrum – Haunter in the Dark
Shoggoth – Mythos
Dreamlongdead – Madnessdeadgrave
Alkaloid – Liquid Anatomy
Lurking Fear – Out Of A Voiceless Grave
Colosseum – Chapter 1: Delirium
Chthe’ilist – Le dernier crepuscule
Hesper Payne – Unclean Rituals
Great old ones – EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy
Obed Marsh – Innsmouth
Catacomb – In the Maze of Kadath
Arkham – Chapter III
Fiendlord – Neuromancy
Hypnos – Arcane Moon
Astrophobos – Remnants of Forgotten Horrors
Crafteon – Cosmic Reawakening
Ancient Niggurath – Horrors and Wonders
Barabas – The Arrival of Yog-Sothoth
Ultar – Kaddath
ceremonial castings – Cthulue
Bal-sagoth – Starfire Burning upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule
Brown Jenkins – Dagonite
Brown Jenkins – Death Obsession
Swampcult – An Idol Carved of Flesh
Swampcult – The Festival
Them Vultures – Weird Tales
Giant of the Mountain – Moon Worship
The Lurking Fear – Out of the Voiceless Grave
Philosopher – Thoughts
Beast Conjurator – Summoned to the Abyss
Beast Conjurator – Strange Aeons Comp
Smothered – The Inevitable End
Yogth Sothoth – Abominations of the Nebulah Mortiis
Nile – Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka
Massacre – From Beyond
Innsmouth – Consumed by Elder Sign
Cosmic Horror – Tales of the Macabre
Coffin Birth – The Bowels of Chaos
dawn of relic – Lovecraftian Dark
temple of the demigod – the great old ones
the uncreation – Dreaming in R’lyeh
Serapheum – Serapheum
Obed Marsh – Innsmouth
Thergothon – Stream from the Heavens
Aldebaran – Dwellers in Twilight
Aldebaran – Buried Beneath the Aeons
Solemn They Await – Sanctuary in the Depths
throng of shoggoths – The Cosmic Reconfiguration
Catacombs – In the Depths of R’lyeh
Innzmouth – Lovecraft’s Dream
Tyranny – Tides of Awakening
Tyranny – Aeons in Tectonic Interment
The Disciples of Zoldon – Blackened Theological Tome
Ripping Corpse – Dreaming with the Dead
Revenant – Prophecies of a Dying World
Deathchain – Death Gods
Aarni – Bathos
Shoggoth – Mythos
Tentacle – Ingot Eye
Skyler Alexandre – Whispers in the Dark
Arkham Witch – Legions of the Deep
Arkham Witch – I Am Providence
Mad God – Tales of a Sightless City
Evangelist – In Partibus Infidelium
Evangelist – Doominicanes
Black Temple Below – Into the Black Temple
aeon sphelion – Visions of Burning Aeons
tortured spirit – Arkham Sanitarium
Keziah – The Ocean Is Not Silent
evoke thy lords – Escape to the Dreamlands
Living Death – Protected from Reality
Mekong Delta – The Music of Eric Zahn
Payne’s Grey – Kadath Decoded
Back to R’lyeh – The Awakening
Back to R’lyeh – Last fight of the Primordial
Back to R’lyeh – The McMurdo Expedition 1909
Infinite Spectrum – Haunter in the Dark

EVERYTHING: BAND NAME | ALL TRACKS BY…

The Great Old Ones – Everything
teen cthulhu – Everything
Drowner – Everything
Portal – Everything
Puteraeon – Everything
Sulphur Aeon – Everything
Azrath-11 – Everything
Colosseum – Everything
fungoid stream – Everything
eyes of leigeia – Everything
Space God Ritual – Everything
Tyrant’s Kall – Everything
Yzordderex – Everything
Bretus – Everything
space mirrors – Everything

“Cats and Dogs” as an automatic audiobook

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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A small experiment, to demonstrate and pin down a workflow for a state-of-the-art ‘expressive audiobook’ reading in 2018, done by affordable consumer text-to-speech software and voice.

Result: The final audio file (42 minutes).

Input text: a difficult one, the complex essay “Cats and Dogs” (1926) by H.P. Lovecraft. Pulp fiction, with simple-sentences and obvious words, might work far better. But this was a stress-test.

Voice used: Ivona ‘Brian’ (British English, 22hz, about $50). ‘Brian’ does not flow across words as smoothly and blandly as the default Windows 8 Microsoft Zira does. As a result Brian sometimes has occasional mis-emphasis of words and a slight slurring, yet is far more expressive in an audiobook than Zira.

1. The text was read by ‘Brian’ in the text-to-speech software TextAloud 4, with the text read out to a standard MP3 file.

* Speed: Normal.
* Pitch: -5 (to deepen the voice slightly).
* Volume: 100% (perhaps too high, you might also try 70%).
* Pauses between sentences: 0.7 seconds (default in TextAloud is 0.5).
* Pauses between paragraphs: two seconds.

(Why not use the free Balabolka reader? Because it doesn’t offer pause adjustment Update: it now offers markup to add pauses and pitch shifts. Further update: Now you can also set universal pauses).

2. I loaded the resulting MP3 output file into the free audio editor Audacity. An Equalisation filter was run to try to cut the 5Khz – 7Khz sibilance. The same preset tried to slightly boost 1KHz – 5KHz, for overall speech intelligibility.

3. The simple free Spitfish De-esser was then run inside Audacity, to further reduce sibilance. (Select All | Effect | Spitfish | Apply | Close). This runs far more quickly than Audacity’s native de-essing filter, as well as being simpler to control. You may have problems seeing the download button so here is a direct .ZIP download.

4. Ran the Effects | Limiter, using its default ‘Soft Limit’ preset.

5. Added Reverb filter, with its default ‘Voice I’ preset.

6. Ran the Spitfish De-esser again, to make a final attempt to reduce the remaining sibilance. Same settings as before.

7. Saved as an MP3, 320bk/s quality, resulting in a 50Mb file for a 42 minute reading.

Incidentally, it’s apparently possible to “chain” these steps (like a Photoshop Action) in Audacity, as a preset, and then play them back automatically. I couldn’t find that option in my Audacity, but that’s perhaps because I have an older version.

Results:

The results were fairly listenable, and (once the raspy ‘synthetic voice sibilance’ was reduced) definitely seems like an advance on previous robo-voices. But the test result was certainly not ideal, due to the ‘Brian’ voice’s unnatural unexpected stresses placed on certain words and the slurring of others. It’s rather like listening to a ‘sticky’/’wobbly’ old cassette tape from the 1980s, and becomes rather wearing after a while. It can result in an aural equivalent of the motion-sickness that one encounters in many videogames.

Perhaps there may be some search-and-replace script that automatically tweaks a text so that ‘Brian’ reads it better, but I couldn’t find one. Simple and immediate global fixes are:

* Change Mr. and Mrs. to Mister and Misses.
* Change capitalised acronyms such as NASA to Nasser, or they will be said ‘En-Ay-Ess-Ay’.
* Change crunched up hyphenation, such as and “then-as you all know-he did something” to “then – as you all know – he did something”.

It also helps to have a good Text Cleaner software running when you copy-paste your text into TextAloud, which will fix line-wrapping and other problems.

There are of course various machine-learning services, such as Amazon Parrot, which claim to offer smoother reading voices for text-to-speech. But they appear to be for big-budget developers, are Cloud-based, and it seems unlikely that owners such as Amazon will ever allow them to be unleashed on the making of long audiobooks (which would compete with Audible). What’s being tested above are the tools available to consumers for less than $100 total.

“Out of the Aeons” in audiobook

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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A full reading of the 10,000 word “Out of the Aeons” by H. P. Lovecraft, one of his best ghost-written tales and with the best reader that I could find offering it for free online. It’s a May 2018 reading by Ian Gordon.

The first half is Lovecraft doing Lovecraft-by-numbers for a revision client, but the second half is excellent. To fully enjoy the story, it helps to know the historical context. While today archaeology is rarely a topic for newspapers, and thus all the press palaver in “Out of the Aeons” may seem jarringly absurd to the modern reader, in the 1930s archaeology was front-page news.

The reading is delivered rather too fast for me, and is also a bit sibilant in high-response headphones. As an MP3 download, in the AIMP player a slower speed of O.92 is ideal. This speed setting also deepens the voice, moving the reading rather nicely from ‘peeved professor’ toward ‘Wayne June’ and the Bass-Boost slider can also increase this effect a little. The graphic equaliser settings for removing the sibilance are…

“A Bit Of The Dark World” in audio

22 Monday Oct 2018

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For the 500th episode of Pseudopod, a complete audio reading of Fritz Leiber’s story “A Bit Of The Dark World” (Fantastic, February 1962). He had written some early stories that drew somewhat on Lovecraft, back in the 1930s and 40s, but without pastiching the master. Today I think of him as a sword & sorcery author linked with the post-Howard Conan series, but here the mature Leiber attempts a tale of cosmic horror fit for the know-it-all world of the early 1960s.

Leiber had been musing about the nature of writing in changing times for some years, such as in his rip-roaring sci-fi comedy-satire “The Silver Eggheads” (1959, expanded as a novel in 1962). This features an A.I. science fiction setting in which ‘novel writers’ are machines with names such as the ‘Fiction House Fantasizer’ with Fingertip Credibility Control!). It’s also a little Lovecrafty, as it riffs on the idea of still-living “genetically-enhanced brains taken from the skulls of once-living writers”.

Sadly there’s no audiobook version of what appears to be a sci-fi comedy classic, and the OCR on the 1959 novelette version at Archive.org isn’t good enough for text-to-speech. Though the novel is, at least, newly available for the Kindle.

A new Tom Shippey interview

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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No mention of Lovecraft, but readers of this blog will likely be interested in a new and excellent 90 minute interview with Tom Shippey, leading Tolkien scholar. Shippey is on top form. As well as various acutely perceptive Tolkien observations, other topics include the establishment attitudes to the study of genre literature, then the real historical Vikings and their recent TV adaptations, and heroism. It’s a dual presenter podcast, but the jokey ‘lots-a-laffs’ approach that such shows commonly exhibit is suppressed for such a heavyweight guest and only creeps back in toward the very end of the show.

Audiobook bookmarking for the Windows desktop

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings, Podcasts etc.

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Why has it always been so difficult for makers of Windows desktop media players to offer simple and easy bookmarking for audiobooks? Maybe they think we’re all using mobile apps on devices nowadays. But there are plenty of audiobook listeners who use Windows desktop + wireless headphones, and wild .mp3 files. Podcasts especially.

Anyway, I finally got fed up of making a screenshot of the audio file being played and its current playback time, to serve as a makeshift bookmark. I went looking for what’s available.

I first tried to fix up my usual VLC player, on discovering it had just the one working bookmarking script that offers bookmarks which persist. The script worked, but was a very clunky fix. I then tried PotPlayer and MusicBee, but after much searching I couldn’t find the supposed bookmarking functions in either one. Both were uninstalled. WorkAudioBook is also free, but is really meant for language learners who need to consult teacher about strange words heard during their listening, and it has rather an old interface. Perhaps the likes of iTunes for Windows desktop offers bookmarking, but there’s no way I’m installing such highly intrusive bloatware. The same goes for any dedicated player Audible may offer.

Eventually I found a player that really does do simple and sensible bookmarking, is currently developed, is genuine freeware and looks nice. It can even rename its bookmarks. AIMP 4.51 appears to be the only maintained freeware that offers simple persistent bookmarks on Windows. Why the others don’t offer this is a complete mystery.

Once the audiobook files are loaded (drag and drop is the easiest option) and saved to a playlist file, then you bookmark the playing audio by pressing the Bookmark star, which you can see in the above screenshot. It’s then easy to start an audio file at the bookmark you made, edit or remove it. You can have multiple bookmarks. You can rename bookmarks. In its Preferences you can also set “Ctrl + B” to instantly load the Bookmarks Manager.

The only problem seems to be that when you select a bookmark without the playlist loaded, the file loads but not the playlist it belongs with. Which means that users will first need to load their audiobook playlist, then load the desired bookmark. No great hassle, but we could all benefit from having one less niggling little workflow to remember.

AIMP also has a graphic equaliser, which is nice for removing sibilance in readings, such as that on Phil Dragash’s magnificent full-cast unabridged LOTR. The user can also adjust playback speed by a fraction, for a slightly slower or faster reading. Pitch can also be shifted, if you have a gratingly high-pitched interviewee on the audio of a podcast. These settings are retained even when you exit and reload the software, and can be saved out to named presets. All this makes AIMP a fine replacement for my Impulse Media Player, which until now I’ve used alongside VLC for audiobooks (despite its lack of bookmarking). Sorry Impulse, I luvved you long time, but… uninstalled.

In AIMP, playlists can themselves be bookmarked after a fashion, by dragging them over to the ‘local files’ panel from either their host folder or from the right-hand playlist panel. By doing that, they make a shortcut which persists in the AIMP interface. Or you can just send the playlist to the Windows desktop as a shortcut, and thus load the audiobook currently being listened to straight from the desktop.

AIMP does not need to be using its own playlist format in order to bookmark. The bookmarks are stored in XML in C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\AIMP\Bookmarks.xml

There are also many skins for AIMP, but for a simple night / day switch of the basic colour scheme the user just hits the “Switch the theme” icon up in the top right of the interface. You can see the ‘night interface’ above.

VLC is still needed as a videoplayer, though. VLC also usefully offers the ability to easily take a pure screenshot from any frame of a video. I had no success with saving VLC playlists out to standard .M3U playlists for opening in AIMP. Nor older Windows .WPL playlists. But it’s no great hardship to re-make old saved playlist files as you listen again to albums and audiobooks. As with most audioplayers, AIMP can also scan your dedicated audio and music folders and then load everything in them into its sortable database. Once that’s done, search filters and keyword search become possible.

All in all, AIMP appears to be the only viable option for regular listeners of downloaded audiobooks, mp3-saved YouTube playlists or long lectures, podcast .mp3s, and similar audio that doesn’t come to you through proprietary channels such as iTunes and Audible.

Update: AIMP also has a fine free Android app you can download from their website. This also does bookmarking.

Conan the Swordsman collection in audio

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Podcasts etc., REH

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Added to my R.E. Howard audio books listings page, which is a page of free Conan readings listed in their story-world chronological order:

There is also a Books for the Blind audiobook of the collection of stories Conan the Swordsman (1978). This collection of briskly-plotted gap-fillers for the Conan chronology is from Nyberg / Lin Carter / de Camp. Their stories successfully mimic Howard, only lacking some of the small telling details that he carefully wove into his stories. Their book has, in order:

“The People of the Summit” (after “Rogues in the House”) (begins at 1 hour 12 minutes into the book reading)
“Shadows in the Dark” (after “Black Colossus”)
“The Star of Khorala” (after “Shadows in Zamboula”)
“The Gem in the Tower” (between “The People of the Black Circle” and “The Pool of the Black One”)
“The Ivory Goddess” (before “Beyond the Black River”)
“Moon of Blood” (after “Beyond the Black River”)

I see there’s also a Books for the Blind audiobook of the Carter / de Camp Conan the Liberator, but I’ve left that off my page. It does fit a big gap in the Howard chronology, telling of how Conan became a King, but is not very well reviewed. While painted on a suitably wide canvas, it’s apparently more of a medieval military novel in which the depiction of Conan is sparse and a bit iffy in terms of his characterisation.