r/Harmontown • u/TreideA • 3d ago
Harmontown Remaster
I've been thinking about remastering the entire podcast. What I have in mind:
- Batter encoding for lower size and better quality.
- Fixing sound issues with stable volume.
- Adding subtitles (we could use AI to translate in multiple languages).
- Creating videos for sound only episodes.
- Creating a better sound only version with stable volume.
- Proper naming and ordering.
- Other suggestions are apreciated.
Anyone what to help? I think it will take a couple of months to have a "definitive" version.
And if we do this, we will need the mayor's aproval to share it.
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u/StyleSquirrel 3d ago
What do you mean by "creating videos for sound only episodes"?
Also, I would personally like it if D&D was separated from everything else but that seems like it would be a heavy lift.
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u/HernandoSantiago 2d ago
The horrors my mind concocted imagining the harmonology episode fed through an AI to make a video episode was a bit too much to behold
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u/sanitarium-1 2d ago
There's already a d&d only one:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqxM5x81hNObdW19K3rRaCZTEyiKuZPgY&si=CRIDjLF9sbk1jMV_
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u/Gregporterhouse 2d ago
I really don't think the token spend would be too intense. Dan sitting dead eyed sluggishly talking to the crowd, then cutting to Jeff, who tells an unbelievable story, then cutting back. That's about 50% of the podcast. AI is just changing the outfits. Real cheap stuff.
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u/NaCloride 2d ago
Did you learn nothing from the podcast? Life is imperfect and messy, which is also what makes it beautiful. The whole point of the show was to have no plan and let things happen organically. Let it be.
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
wax-based colognes
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u/Ok-Juice5741 3d ago
Idk I doubt the mayor would give approval for a project that includes feeding the entire podcast through AI. Feels like a non-starter
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u/thesixler 2d ago
I don’t even think he would give approval to re-release harmontown in any form, it’s just that people keep doing that without permission. We were going to do a big thing a bit like this and then it got canceled.
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
oh, that's good to know. I got the opposite impression when the video catalog was, essentially, left out in the open for the vultures (myself included) to pick at.
If the owners of the IP would rather it not be rereleased by fans then I'm happy to comply.
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u/thesixler 2d ago
So how do you download the videos now? I thought the site was down
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u/DuckODeath 2d ago
It took me a couple sessions but a few years ago I downloaded them from the site one by one. Now they are on my plex server. I don’t torrent them or anything though I have sent them to a couple people from this sub.
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
Sorry, I wasn't very clear.
When I said "the video catalog was [...] left out in the open" I was referring to a short period of time before the site was completely shut down when the paywall had been removed and anyone could view all the content. I think it was like that for a month or two.
As a side note, even when the paywall was up, I think all the files were still downloadable without a subscription. The links just weren't shared publicly. They were, however, easily guessable (and the website had a sitemap xml file that gave you pretty much all the info you needed to write a script to guess the filenames).
Edit: to answer your question about how to download the videos. I heard there was a torrent for them. I haven't checked it, though, because I make a backup of the website when the paywall was down.
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u/thesixler 2d ago
Right, so currently there’s no way to officially get them?
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
Not that I know of.
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u/TreideA 3d ago
If you think it wasn't used for training yet...
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u/Ok-Juice5741 3d ago
I don’t think that. I’m sure it has been. I’m saying your project explicitly says it’s going to use AI, which is a choice you made that I personally feel goes against pretty much everything the podcast stood for
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u/sacrebluh 2d ago
If someone has access to the files before Dustin got cancelled, I swear that the sound quality was superior and when he left he must have took his mastered files and the quality dropped a lot
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 3d ago
I've thought about adding the podcast audio files to the videos as secondary audio tracks as they are often mixed better... but I'm sure a lot of editing would still be required.
I'd be happy to chip in once in a while is this is an open project.
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u/oligneisti 2d ago
Syncing the audiofile to the video might be troublesome since they might not always be the same length.
I think sometimes stuff was removed from one version and not the other. Just minor details would derail the project.
Of course, if it is the exact same length you could just use mkvtoolnix to add a new audiotrack.
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
oh yeah, alignment will definitely be an issue, but I've been meaning to play around with signal processing in code, and this could be a fun excuse to learn the basics.
I imagine there are ways to rank similarity in audio clips, so the problem will be figuring out where to insert cuts and then how to align the segments to maximize similarity. The fact that the relative ordering of the segments has to be the same will help a lot.
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u/TreideA 2d ago
I don't think it's possible to have them as secondary audio. Technically it won't be possible to have 2 videos on the same file.
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u/FetaMight I can, you know, like, lift a rock and, go to the beach n' stuff 2d ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Re-encoding/re-packaging the existing videos with an additional audio track is definitely possible. I'm not sure what you mean by having 2 videos on the same file, though.
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u/GolemThe3rd 1d ago
I don't think its all that necessary tbh, tho I DO think there's a use for an archival project collecting all the podcasts that he appears in around that time
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u/nolongermakingtime 2d ago
You can't really remaster something unless you have access to the raw files. You're taking a compressed file from a streaming service and processing it again just to go back through that compression again. You can only lose quality, not gain it.