I finally finished noise removal on Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--huzzah! God, that was a whole lot of noise removal. It wasn't just the excessive length of the chapter, but also the fact that there's a lot of dialog with the aliens, and I decided to take out all breath sounds from translated speech. I was subtle about it, so it doesn't sound as artificial as the computer's speech or the Magic Man's speech--the idea is to make it slightly nonhuman. Aesthetically, I think it works, but actually doing it is a real pain in the butt!

I find it interesting how there's this whole artistic side to the audiobook--it's not something I'd ever thought about before, but there it is. Another thing that's unique to the audiobooks is how characters pronounce "General Jesus." The diplomats all use the Spanish pronunciation of "Jesus," since presumably he was Cuban, and I think they would regard that as the correct thing to do. But the SFers all use the English pronunciation. My thinking is that that is how they would have been briefed about him--you know, using the English pronunciation to emphasize that this guy is crazy and actually thinks he's this religious figure. Their job was to kill him, so there would be no effort to show him respect by using his own pronunciation--quite the contrary, the idea would be to take him down a peg verbally. Kind of like how soldiers refer to members of the Taliban as Tabbies.