The Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest article for today is finished, but the *mysterious article* and the Fraxy boss article aren’t going to be ready until Sunday. So, what happened? Well, the answer is that two things in particular took far longer than I was expecting them to. First, after deciding not to move on from Windows 7 for an entire year I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 at the last minute on Friday night. This seemed simple enough since it was just a matter of getting it installed and then having it perform the bulk of the upgrade process overnight. Except it turns out that I am (or at least my computer is) one of the ‘lucky’ few to have the install process get stuck at 99% and it wasn’t under this afternoon that it at last finished installing so I could then proceed to spend about two hours between the actual upgrade process and getting most of the important stuff set up properly.
Secondly, you may have noticed that the audio for the Tier 2 levels of MaGMML is awfully quiet. I may very well go back and fix this as much as I can at some point (or just re-record those levels), but I had assumed it was a one-time issue with the recording and proceeded to record the footage for today’s MaGMML article. I’ve done enough game-related bug testing (and written about it here and there too) to know that you should never take such things for granted, so this definitely comes down to carelessness on my part, but the audio for today’s levels was also quiet and even garbled in some spots. As this was clearly going to be a recurring problem which absolutely had to be fixed (and I did try recording another game to make sure it wasn’t just a strange issue with this one), I spent a decent amount of time hunting down the issue. Somehow the solution turned out to be unchecking a setting in VLC Media Player (which was also having problems with certain audio files lately), which instantly fixed the audio issue in both VLC Media Player and my recording software, Bandicam, for reasons which I don’t understand and will probably need to look into more tomorrow. I also decided that instead of tossing out my recording (I was pretty happy with my run through the levels) I would instead figure out which files in the MaGMML music file matched up with which songs in the game, convert their format to a usable one with Audacity, and splice them into the video. It took quite a bit of time due to the fact that I’m not very familiar at all with Audacity and the video doesn’t have any sound effects now, but the music is loud and clear and I’m happy to have learned a few of the basics of audio editing along the way.