Tuesday 17 October 2023

Necropolitans: the Lost Tapes!

So with one thing and another, I was checking some details of the early campaign timeline and wanted to check which episode something appeared in.

Answer: it didn't!

I spent ages going back and forth trying to work out if we'd just done the prewritten island section wildly out of order. Nope. One episode finishes, the next opens with the PCs midway through exploring a ruined temple. Now, this was definitely wrong.

So I've dug deep into my old backups, and found some stray VRF files from back when we were still using Ventrilo to record. The dates didn't match any of the existing episodes either, but sat between them. Now I just had to open them and check the contents.

VRF files though.

Nothing opens VRF files. Audacity will import them - as a hideous, howling, screeching blare. So I reinstalled Ventrilo, pulled a couple of files in and exported them. Long, silent .wavs ensued. Large .wavs, mind you - deliciously datalicious .wavs. But silent nonetheless.

After quite a long time faffing about, I installed the 32-bit version of Vent through Wine on my Linux Thinkpad, moved the VRFs across, and was able to extract them to something usable.

So it turns out there are three sessions that just went missing, and I'm going to need to edit them and reorder all the existing episodes from 14 onwards. Fun times. Also, these are back in the Dark Times of single-track recording (why, Vent, why, everyone is already sending info on a different channel T_T) and Ollie being some kind of audio vampire who doesn't show up in recordings. I have the greatest respect for anyone not involved who accepts these tribulations and nevertheless wades through.

So, new episodes will take longer than planned, and I'm afraid the existing RSS feed might get messed up when I rerelease the renumbered ones. My apologies.

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