Cleaning up Immersion Clutter
I’ve talked about how you have to carefully choose what to put on your Ipod for your immersion environment. However, being selective often causes you to miss out on a lot of material that you wish you could add, but don’t because it has too much non-Japanese time or other things that get in the way.
Solution: edit it away
It’s much easier than you think to edit out portions that otherwise ruin great immersion tracks.
You can get rid of:
1. Non-speaking time: for those long action scenes, or very silent scenes.
2. Disgusting noise: nothing ruins a track more than someone vomiting loud in your ears.
3. Irritating noise: I despise babies crying or childbirths on my Ipod.
4. Loud noise: screaming, blasting music, monster howls, or power ups.
5. Speaking in another language.
6. Theme songs: Leave them in if you really love them. But while I can listen to a J-drama 100 times, the same does not go for the theme song.
How to edit:
I’ve used two free programs that easily accomplish all of this. They are easy to use even if you have never used an mp3 editing program.
Mp3 Direct Cut: This is my #1 choice. It is simple, uses low computer resources, and you can do what you want in a few seconds.
Audacity: I originally used this until I found MP3 Direct Cut. I think this may have more advanced features, but I didn’t like the CPU usage it required.
Start cleaning up your collection and make your immersion Ipod even better.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Hi, I’m sorry to comment on such an old post, but I need some help with editing some of these things (or you could just point me to somewhere on the internet if you don’t have the time) in some of my dramas. How exactly do I go about doing these things (specifically editing out non-speaking time) in Mp3 Direct Cut?
I would like to use Kekkon Dekinai Otoko but there is some annoying silent scenes that take up a few minutes at the start.
Also, how do I level the sounds so that there aren’t really silent or loud parts?
Thanks a ton! I love this website and it has helped me tremendously.
With using Mp3 Direct Cut it was quite a manual process, and I haven’t used it in a while to remember exactly how to do it. Editing became a burden, and I started to just fast forward through these intrusive parts. To deal with sudden loud or quiet scenes, I instead started using ear buds that had volume control, and just adjusted that way. I’m aware this isn’t helpful when they come on quickly.
This info may not exactly help you. However! Writer Coco wrote a more thorough guide on this site including how to easily remove silence and balance out sound levels using audacity. See if it helps.
http://japaneselevelup.com/2012/11/07/jalup-adventurers-cocos-journey-8-back-in-action/
thanks a lot!
That post from Coco is actually really helpful, thanks for that!
That link is no longer working so if others like me are looking for the referenced article look here: http://japaneselevelup.com/jalup-adventurers-cocos-journey-1-embarkment/
Find the heading “Random Thoughts” and the Audacity tips are a little above that :)
Thanks for updating that link. As this site grows posts get organized and reorganized, and while I try to update them, sometimes links (especially in the comments) occasionally don’t lead to the right place.
So I says appreciate these kind of comments!
A really quick way of extracting just the speech from dramas that I discovered on a forum today is to substosrs an episode, extracting audio, then join all the audio files created into 1 mp3 instantly using Mp3 Album Maker by Makeitone. It cut the first episode of Hana Yori Dango down to 17 minutes. Gives it a really weird flow though, because it really just gets rid of all pauses that are more than about a second. Not sure if I like the over-the-top fast pace but it’s useful. I mean, it means you can consume all the drama’s speech in 17 minutes – very efficient. (Some dramas are longer though – the last episode of Soratobu Kouhoushitsu is 35 mins.) Plus it’s a completely automatic editing process.
Thanks for adding this great tip despite the age of this post. Saving time from having to edit yourself is a great thing. Im sure it probably works better on some types of shows then others, but come back and let us know what you think about it after using this technique for a while.
Whether you think it’s worthwhile in the long run, or it started to be too much information overload.
I personally split up all of my passive immersion material in 3 minute segments; it’s easy to do with software such as subs2srs; in the tools option you can extra audio from media and you can select to seperate it in specific lengths too. That way if any part is bad (ie loud noises, not much speaking, opening/ending theme), I can just instantly delete that one part and dont even need to start opening the files in some audio editing software to cut parts out. And having everything be the same length as a song is quite nice, oto
Thanks for adding that tool. That seems like a pretty efficient away to clean things up.