I did give "distraction-free writing" a few gos when it was all the rage - full-screen text views with minimal things on display apart from the actual text. It never really became a habit though. I seem to be a windowed person by nature, seeing how I have also never got into neither full-screen windows nor spaces (also known as virtual desktops and probably at least five other things). I rarely even minimize windows, mainly because Macos makes it too much effort to get the minimized windows back into view.
What I do do all the time is hide applications. It only takes a keypress, nothing gets added to the dock, and all the windows pop back into view as soon as I switch to that application. Perfect. So right now I am writing this with all other windows hidden, my text surrounded by a nice expanse of colourful desktop background.
And, down on the laptop screen, a pile of files and folders I would love to clean out but have to admit that they do motivate their place on account of being in use very frequently. (Good thing I looked, I could clean out a few which I was done with!)
So, um, yes, considering that detour, distraction-free environments do have their point.
Sounds from rooms past
I just finished editing the coming week's Kodsnack. It is one of the semi-rare chats recorded face to face using our increasingly ancient yet still rock-solid interview microphone, and as always when I hear the recorded sound I start dreaming about buying more audio processing software.
(Some would argue that I should start dreaming about costlier interview microphones first, but I am great at not worrying about these things before or during interviews, so I only start thinking about the sound once I edit, and then my mind goes to what I could do about it at that stage. Recording Fredrik clearly had no care at all for editing Fredrik, so editing Fredrik has to focus on what he can do. Then publishing Fredrik will promptly forget about both those guys, and the circle will repeat.)
To make it short (and also because I do not know enough to be more detailed), I would like to kill some more of the room sound and possible raise and even the volume a bit more on the result. Oh, and I want the end result to sound reasonably natural. All the classics.
There is, of course, an element of me holding back from actively researching the topic. For one reason because it is such an obvious expensive rabbit hole, and for another because if I were to spend money on something, better interview microphones would probably have a much higher return on investment in the beginning.
Darn, I just came up with a counter-argument to that: software would come in handy all those times when online recordings come out less than stellar too. They could bring up the lowest level of useful audio quality without any actions at all required by remote guests. That is, and probably always will be, a much more common occurrance than face-to-face recordings.
Sigh, I guess I will put "research audio plugins" or some such thing on a list … It is Sunday and review time in any case …