I'm curious how many of my fellow guildites do audio editing. I know some, possibly many, do. And I want to encourage others of you to consider it.

I recently had the opportunity to perform an audio edit for a fill of one of my scripts, Alien College Student Extracts Your Seed for Science. The script is very SFX-heavy, the goal being to have a "retro-futurism ASMR alien audio" feel to it. I consider all of my SFX to be optional, but this script definitely would benefit from having the SFX. A VA, the versatile and astoundingly talented u/Lurkydip, contacted me, saying that she wanted to do the script but that she doesn't do SFX and would hand the recording off to me to complete it.

Having never done audio editing before (other than a little bit in the context of my garage rock band back in the day, but that hardly counts TBH 🤣), I almost told her "Thanks, but no..." However, I strongly suspected that the script would never be filled otherwise, and I really wanted to see it come to life. I also thought her recording of it was spectacular. And, I'd already done a good deal of the leg work, having provided SFX recommendations from freesound.org with the script offer.

So I installed Audacity and set about transforming Lurky's wonderful recording into the retro-futurism ASMR sci-fi audio I'd dreamed of when I wrote the script. YouTube was helpful for the particulars, as was my beta listener, the brilliant u/Evanescent_Blush. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'd love it if Guild members would give it a listen and provide any feedback for my edit. I know that there are a few places where I could have improved stuff some, but as any writer knows, the perfect is the enemy of the good. And I do think it is good.

I found Audacity fairly easy to use. Although it's available on all the standard operating systems, I installed it on an Ubuntu VM and that was simple. If you do this, give yourself plenty of disk space, the Audacity file for this one audio is 600 MB. (The audio itself is a more reasonable 20 MB.)

It was a great experience to get to bring to life my vision for this script. I am super glad I took the time to do this. And, I think it would be very valuable for writers to at least have a passing understanding of what VAs have to do to their raw recordings, particularly if you're a writer who likes to use a lot of SFX recommendations.