Dialing In: The Smartphone Audition Debate

Are any her three Welcome the pro Audio this week, Thanks you guys, a professional and motivator. Thanks to Try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian Audio Making Passion Herd introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging Sidney to the video Stars, George the Tech Whittam from LA and Me, Andrew Peters voice over Talent and Home Studio Guy, and don't forget the code tri PAP two hundred that will get you two hundred dollars off your try booth and of course Austrian Audio Making Passion heard an email came via our union here in Australia at the MUBA talking about voice over auditions and they want talent to do auditions only on a You can't of see why they're thinking of that. But the issue I've got is that phone are not that bad. There's too many road casters in this conversation. We've got to move away from the default bankage. So what is the reason Andrew did they did? They say? Is it because they think that the crap equality is going to well, the supposed crap equality would be my opinion. It's going to make people think twice about just using it. That is correct. It's going to be MP three from your telephone purposely made bad. But is it really We've talked about this on the show before. I mean, the iPhone in a microphone, sorry, the microphone in an iPhone is spectacularly good. So what's the point or is it or is it more that the consumer doesn't care anyways? Meant to be an equalizer, so everybody sounds equally mediocre, the equal Joe Meek mediocre. The equalizer will inherit the voiceover industry or you were saying you were saying so that they purposely don't use the audition for the job. Correct, it's like protection. I guess that makes sense. I mean, I know in the States people love it when they get their auditions lifted and they don't have to record it again. Yeah yeah, or you record them anyways and you still use the audition. Yes. So that's fascinating. So did you get a direct answer as to why or is it just a mandate don't ask questions? It kind of came via my agent, who's forwarded it from the Union. There's also disclaim a form as well to protect you, so you have to read a disclaimer on your audition saying that my voice cannot be used for AI and blah blah blah blah blah. So it's all about AI. But it's kind of like a The more I thought about the iPhone thing, particularly iPhone and an iPhone fifteen, you can get away with using that actually for broadcast really if it's done correctly. Yeah, if you record in a quiet, well tuned environment, you're gonna have a very good sounding iPhone recording. Yeah, well, pleased iPhone will sound better than a poorly placed you eighty seven. Absolutely well, So maybe that maybe the directive should have been stand on your local street corner and record on your phone. Maybe that should Or just ask Robert. Yeah yeah, just listen to the Week any episode. Just check out Robert and you'll get a good idea of what you should run the hoover or the vacuum cleaner while you're doing a audition. Yeah yeah, yeah, you recording my place? You know, kids screaming, toilet's flushing, you know all the fun that's or toilet's screaming and yes, and kids flashing exactly. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. So what medium are you recording with just to the voice memo app on your phone on this seeming So I used the phone once to muck around with when I bought a road microphone that plugged into your phone, and I think I use garage band from memory. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I never record on the phone anyway. But if this is the new directive, I don't really know whether it's going to achieve much because all right, so someone's not going to use it for the real job, so you're not going to get it stolen. They can still use it for AI because if you're training a robot then it doesn't matter what it sounds like, really good enough to train an AI bye. Yeah. And then again the other thing is, of course, if you send in an audition that sounds like shit, you don't want the person at the other end to go, oh god, their studio is awful. I won't be using them. Well, this is the thing. Are they going to be told that you're auditioning on your phone or are they just going to get your audition expecting that you're going to be in your booth in your home. Well, I don't know. And the other thing is, of course it's a directive here, But I mean, what if I'm auditioning for another country, why don't they just take all the auditions and run it through a plug and that makes it sound like ap boy. You could do that as well. Yeah, yeah, just make it. Just give it a four K low pass redone with it. Yeah, so just real sound like a telephone. Yeah, yep, okay, how about this, Okay, I got it ready. When they post it, they just put a little watermarker in there, they goes voice jungle. Do you remember this is probably a long, long, long time ago, but there was a point at one once they were worried about records being bootlegged and they used to put something there was some kind of weird frequency. When you tried to record dub something across it would have had this weird frequency through it. Oh really, yeah, I think I think on tapes, yeah, try they try to do something that would mess with the bias of a tape, the bias you couldn't make a dub of it. And then later in CDs you found that with the remind me of the code spit if had the s RC. There was a setting when you'd a CD it would only allow one digital generation to be made. In the second digital generation could not be copied SRC or something was that called. I don't remember, but yeah, it's a sample bit like people would call it sample bit. I think. Yeah, when you master a CD, it can actually enable a bit that will prevent that disc from being copied. Yeah, I remember that in my recording in like wave lab or whatever it was using to master or burn the master you could say, do not make this disc copyable and then and then if you had a professional dat machine, it wouldn't give a crap and it would copy it anyways. Yeah, it was connected via AES or via SPDF, SPDF or AS would I believe, well, definitely spd IF, No, no, no sp DIFF because SPTIF carried more metadata than AES, I believe. I don't know that if it was carried over AES. SPDF was the consumer protocol and AS was a pro correct protocol. And then there was another change to it because then after that, when recordable CDs came out, the music industry wanted its royalties for all the music that was gonna get bootlegged. So they made special, more expensive recordable CDs, so that then when you bought a consumer CD recorder, you had to buy these more expensive CDs. Like Phillips came out with the eight seventy and it was a cheap CD recorder, but you could only use these expensive discs. But then everyone figured out that all you had to do was you had bought one expensive disc and you put it in the machine and you primed it for record, and then you waited and you just grabbed your fingernails underneath the CD train and you pulled it out and you switched the disc with a cheap disc, and you pushed it in without like triggering the closed motor so it didn't notice start its cycle up again. Wow. And then you could just record on cheap discs and you didn't have to have an expensive recorder like you know, because if not, you were buying like an HHP or like a thousand dollars CD recorder instead of a three hundred dollars Wow. Wow they wow, And wish I had a nine that hackled Ijeezy Guy. And then the other thing that you don't remember on the CD was the pre emphasis bit that would raise the high end, right, that's what pre emphasis did. It raised the high end a little bit extra. Yeah, I don't remember why, but I do remember that I had that to compensate for shitty playback system. I don't know, because like there's the R I I A e Q curve on phonographs. It was almost like that. Yeah, it's like a that was emphasis d emphasis. Yeah. Scums that's what they called it, s CMS Serial Copy Management System. They're called scum because they hated it. That's annoying. Well, I mean, based on that scum, why don't they do it? Why don't we have a scum in a di W? So we just hit that when we recorded. So it sounds great, but no one's people. People are talking about things like this, like trying to find a way to be able to track the media from even where it all goes. So, for instance, if you have a sound effects library, the sound effects can be seen inside of the mix that they are and then somehow the person gets royalty. So it's I don't know, it's pretty hard problem to solved. It seems like there's a thousand ways to get around it and only one way to make sure it works. Right. This phone thing going back to that just for a second, because it's just occurred to me. Does it sort of smack of desperation to you that this sort of clutching its straws is sort of like, well, you know, this is the best we can do. Does it feel to you like it does to me that maybe they're just getting desperate with this whole thing? To me, it's smacks of I didn't know there was that big of a problem with pilfering auditions that this is necessary. Yeah, I'm shocked. I mean I would never have thought of this as a solution, but I would have thought of another way to do it. But this is a super It's a thing that anybody can do because everybody has a smartphone at this point. And it doesn't fix the fidelity problem necessarily because you can really you can still record in really great sounding fire. I mean even more so you can now upras stuff. I'm sure this is going to hit for audio. But someone brought me a SD it's DVD, but it might as well have been a VHS. It just looked like shit, compare all the video that we're used to right and took it to AI and it made it look like proper HD. It just interpolated everything, all the missing bits. It's just like I know it would have been here, here's the nose here. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I suppose. I suppose you've sort of got to be these sort of unions and stuff have to be seen to be doing something. But I don't know that they're really doing anything. I can't see it making any difference. I mean, you've just got to be really really careful about who you auditioned for. They've just got to be trustworthy, and they've got to be a signatory of a union so they don't break the law. Otherwise they use lose their memberships of the union. I mean, I can't think of any other way of doing it. There's got to be some kind of way of punishing. But if someone wants to do it, they'll do it anyway. Is that there's too many desperate voice actors just desperate to find any kind of work, and they just don't care. They just want to get any opportunity to work, so they set themselves up to be ripped off and then yeah, next thing they know, they take a gig where they're just like reading the dictionary and all of a sudden, their voice is cloned or it's part of a clone that you don't know what that's in and they've just been part of a because this is like a big data war, is really what it boils down to. And and how do you protect your data when your data is just like coming off of you like light? Yeah? Yeah, well, I mean when you think about how many auditions people do every day, you know, how much how much sort of unused voiceover is actually floating around out here? There must be craploads of it so much. Well did I did I tell you what we want to do with the echo servers? Like and that we don't really want to do this, by the way, so don't worry, But we just thought it'd be funny if we ever just like took a record of all the junk that gets set into echo. Imagine what people, Yeah, there's fucking piece of ship, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, God damn it. What does my mic sound like? Shit? What's going on? Yeah? Yeah all that, Rubbie Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be hilarious. You can do a rap song out of it, something, you know, just sound. There's like a lot of material there, just absolutely yeah, yeah, the source elements. Yeah, the source elements twelve inch or something. Echo Ruler yeah yeah, there you go, yeah Rule yeah yeah, Echo. You got have fun with that. You could actually tell people, you know, you could say you could sort of have a competition. The person who leaves is the best line for our remix wins our twelve months subscription to Nexus or something. There you go. That would be a really fun one. I mean, right now, it's like we don't run the queue manager because it would just fill up in an hour and then computer would explode. Yeah. Interesting, there you go. It's funny, isn't it. I mean, AP and I were talking about subjects we were going to talk about today, and I was flicking back through our catalog of shows, just looking for ideas, and it goes back as far as like twenty twenty. We were talking about AI back then. It's just it's been an overriding sort of shadow over the industry for so long, hasn't it. But in the last two years it has gotten it's gone worse. But I mean, yeah, but you can go back to twenty twenty and we were talking about it then. It's just been this big black cloud hanging over the industry for so long, hasn't it. It's just weird, Dorry, there won't be the industry anymore. So it's all, well, god, oh that's really It's crazy, isn't it. You know, I've been delving thanks to George's influence, I've been delving into AI a little bit. And man, some of the stuff, you know, just images even, you know, conjure me up this image and bang, there it is. You know, it's just crazy. Thing is I recognize all of images that you post as being AI generalated. I'm sure very distinct style. It's very it's a signature to it. It's like it's it's just an we if we if you know, you know, I guess is what I'm saying. Most people could care less. But yeah, yes, a slippery slope that we're sliding on down into the depths of God knows where exactly the slurp Yeah, who knows? Yeah. Splash the pro Audio Suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connects, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. George Don't forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say it. Drop us a note at our website.