Working with a dubbing script can be very tricky, especially when dealing with time-sensitive Japanese scripts. This is partially because the language consists of 3 writing systems: hiragana (e.g., “いろは”), katakana (e.g., “イロハ”), and kanji (e.g., “百花繚乱”). While each hiragana/katakana character represents a syllabary of this phonetic lettering system, kanji may contain one or more … Read more

Oh… wow. It feels just like yesterday (really!) that I founded this audio production studio in September of 2004 – twenty years ago. The idea of establishing this business of mine began growing at around early 2003, back while I was still employed at this technology-driven translation agency named GK Associates. One day, I proposed … Read more

Today, I bid farewell to my old package manager, “MacPorts“, and migrate/reinstall/reconfigure pretty much everything that had to do with development to Homebrew. Boy! That took me half of my day. This leap also took some considerable amount of courage for me, since I kept relying on MacPorts for almost two decades. So far, so … Read more

Prior to this month, I was grappling with a bit of dilemma. On all of my 4 functioning workstations (MacPro, Mac mini, and two laptops), I had different versions of command-line job tools installed. So when I call up a tool – say, “jQuote” for assessing/quoting Japanese VO scripts – it’d behave differently across workstations… … Read more

After years of pondering over, we finally went Source-Connected (“Standard”… and not that pesky “Now”, if you know what I mean). Yey!! 🙂 We look forward to more real-time, fast, and sure collaborations!!

A new mic preamp is here in our studio: BAE 1073MP: Sonically speaking, it’s a significant leap forward from Focusrite ISA One that we used for 11 years (!). Now with my beloved AKG C-414 XL-II, my voice sounds PRISTINE to say the least! After using this 1073MP for an hour or so, I switched … Read more

First of all, we now have a new recording room. The room is fully tuned, and is VERY quiet to the point that silence hurts my ears! I thought we were ready to grapple with the COVID-19 crisis … but I was wrong. The wave was so huge! Due to the coronavirus-related lockdown of the … Read more

It took me some courage to finally jump off the cliff, to get a Catalina-installed machine. Phew!! Since my main task is voice production, I really had to make sure my audio tools run flawlessly. I must make sure my main audio interface – UA Apollo Twin Duo – functions well via Thunderbolt 3 ports. … Read more

This process makes me nervous each time. It’s not only me… or is it? And … what’s this WaveLab doing, anyway?

I do my best to clean up unwanted pops and clicks in my voiceover products. For an instance like this one above… I’ll just select the region and delete. But for more intricate edits, I use WaveLab’s pen tool to rectify jagged waveform patterns. Do you?