Dear all,

Does anyone still remember Deep Talk? If the answer is negative, don't worry at all. It use to be a TeamTalk server I unsuccessfully tried to popularise a while ago. That small place is dead and gone, and it will stay that way. Nevertheless, one particular part of that tiny community had a moderate success, and it seems to still be remembered. I'm talking of course about the audio drama group. For those who don't know, we used to gather inside a virtual room, listen to a radio play, and share feelings and opinions about it. It was like going to the cinema together, but of course our films had no visuals. Recently, I was surprised to receive two messages from two different people asking if it might be possible to do that again. It was unexpected, but yes, this made me want to try again, perhaps a little differently this time.

The collection has grown considerably, it now goes beyond 5000, if we only count the English language section. It would be selfish of me to keep it for myself and not share this hobby with others, it will definitely make a difference, at least I hope it will.

On the practical side, the sessions will be held on Google Meet, for two main reasons: 1. It is possible to stream audio without sharing the entire sound of the computer. 2. Anyone can join, without restrictions, from any browser, even without having a gmail account. TeamTalk used to be a problem, many people didn't want to use it, therefore we are ditching it for good.

If enough people are interested in the second incarnation of this experiment, I will be happy to start organising it again, only a little better this time. Therefore, I kindly invite all those who would like to take part, to fill in this online questionnaire:
https://forms.microsoft.com/r/u0qSiYx9dx

I'll wait for about a week, after which I'll either make the next step, or, in case the enthusiasm is low, I'll go back to enjoying these treasure on my own as before. Needless to say, I am available to answer any questions, either here on the public forum, or by private messages on the playroom. Anyone can talk to me, I rarely bite, promise. If your English is at least intermediate, you're more than welcome. Actually, those who don't feel very confident about their language skills are strongly encouraged to join. They'll certainly improve a lot by listening and trying to understand a new story each time. In addition, natives and advanced speakers will be around and ready to help and explain, in case the story is too complicated or accents are too strong. We're all here to learn from each other.

Thank you very much everyone, apologies for this incredibly long post, hope at least some of you are still awake. Warm regards!

Update! Many thanks to all those who took the time to respond. The form will remain online and open indefinitely, in case anyone new decides to join later. If you get an error when trying to access the form, it means that the project isn't around anymore. For the time being though, we're alive and growing. Cheers!

is this any good? And what kind of audio drama is it?

Is it that type where it follows a story-telling approach with all the expositories and all that a text story entails? Ex.

Narrator: describes the scene.
Character 1: speaks.
Narrator: describes what character 1 did.
Character 2: speaks.
Narrator: describes again.

Or is it in a presentation approach? Ex.

The movements and actions of the characters are presented by themselves through decreased volume and dialogs in normal volume accompanied with sound effects and ambient music or sound track.

Character 1: Muttering to oneself. "Sigh, I have a lot of things to do today." Sounds of paper being handled. "Where was that document again?" Sound of rummaging. "Aha! Found it!"
Sound of door opening. Sound of breeze. Eerie sound track.
Character 1: Muttering. "Why does the temperature decreases all of a sudden?"

You get the gees. I'm more interested on the latter than the former.

yes i'm interested, but I too have the same questions as darkness asked.

I think he has a mixture of both kinds of drama. The 2 previous posts made me laugh. I'm interested, in joinging in, Since I'm not so shy when it comes to voice chat, although I'm a bit lazy to do it sometimes. Depending on the time of evening. In any case I've filled in the form, so will see how it goes. I've never used google meet, so will need some help on that.
Anyway, regards all.

I do wonder how google meet would work in this case. Whilst I really like the platform and the convenience it grants, it does have this problem of having... not the best audio quality, shall we say. When you present(which is meet's way of share screen) has mono audio which may take off from the experience of listening to an audio drama where sound is pretty much the main point of focus. Initially I was thinking having a separate meet instance to listen to the audio dramas, but that would also not work because if you where to route your audio through a an audio cable of some sorts like vac, it would have noise reduction since meet does that to your input device and there doesn't seem to be any way to toggle it off like there in zoom(original audio or something similar, if memory serves)

what about we should prefer either zoomm or skype? since both give the option of sharing audio and both works fine as far I have used and seen

I still know them as radio plays but now you here the term audio drama or radio drama but it is the same. Imagine TV without the pictures, you just use your imagination. You can get book adaptions, theatre plays or plays that are just written for radio. The shortest I have is just under 15 minutes and the longest is 150 minutes but most now are either 45 minutes or 60 minutes long. Some serials are 30 minute long but that can be between 2 and 8 episodes. Years ago the BBC used to broadcast 90 minute plays but those are rare now sadly. I mostly stream 90 minute plays via another website using teamtalk but why not give a free table a chance. The one great thing about 3 tables is if you miss the start then you can listen from the beginning.

The BBC offer some plays as podcasts and you can find some elsewhere so why not give them a try if you want to find out what a play is like.

Or there is radio 4 extra, which repeats stuff. Or podcasts like the previous poster said. Free tables could work. If there are those that don't want to voice chat, they could just write what they thought about the drama.

Hi.
Is It only on Teamtalk? Because I nolonger use Teamtalk.

I really loved audio dramas before. In our local radio station, they often aired good stuff from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Sadly, the genre nowadays shifted to romance exclusive. That decreases my interest. I'm like where the good scifi from before, the paranormal, the cozy mystery, the horror genre, action and adventure...? Where's the creativity and the variety? I have the suspicion that all the other genre writers contacted Covid19 and dropped off of writing since I've heard one of them, really contracted it, and another one, the action adventure writer, got an accident and went RIP.

Imprisoned person, I haven't the faintist idea what you are talking about. Do you mean the radio stations you listen too? Confused here.

Hi everyone,

Okay, let's try to clarify all this.

@imprisonedindarkness: I also prefer the second approach, and it's definitely what we can try to focus on, although all radio plays I have are a mixture of both. There is some narration no doubt, but it's rarely intrusive as it could be in your description. 95% of my collection is made of BBC/RTE plays. If You'd like to know more about what they do and how, this may help:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/genres/drama/player

@mystified_meutwo: Please see the answer above.
@godfather: I chose Meet precisely because it allows audio streaming. You can try it: when in a meeting, click on "Present now", and select a Chrome tab where you have previously opened an audio file from your drive. It streams in stereo and without quality loss, if your connection is fast enough. This isn't perfect of course, sometimes the streaming stops for no reason and the only way is to restart the file and use quick advance to bring it back where it stopped. But still, it's better than sharing your entire sound through Zoom or Teams. Of course if someone knows of a better way of doing this, I'm curious to hear it. I don't know how to present in Skype without having to share the sound of my whole computer, but I'm all ears if someone is willing to teach me.
About Free tables: If someone can tell me how to stream a file without using Dropbox, again I'm all ears, and have nothing against trying this. But I only have OneDrive and Google Drive and have no intention to have a third cloud, for reasons I'd rather not discuss here.
@Emrah20: No, not Teamtalk anymore, it's a Meet call open to everyone. No need to have a Gmail account to join, any browser is enough.

All right, I hope things are a bit less confusing now. Let's see where this goes and how we can make it work for everybody. Cheers!

well, thanks for clarification.
also, if you wana streame on ft and you have gdrive/ OneDrive, this may help.
google drive direct link generator.

Thanks but how does that help? I don't understand. What is it? A website? A software?

it is a website. it takes your google drive link of the file as input, and gives out a direct download link to the file. this link is which you can use to stream the audio in pr.

Thank you, this was very helpful.

Actually I think we should try it. Next Sunday, October 8, you are all invited to a test session, at 5 PM my time, which means 9:30 PM in India, and 11 AM on the East Coast in North America. Let's see how it goes. See you all on Sunday!
P.S. I'll check this thread as well from time to time in case there is more confusion, or any questions to answer. Cheers!

So, I guess that would be 7 in the evening. Here in South Africa? Sorry if this is a strange question.

@sound2, yes, that's the case in our local radio station here.
@metal_phoenyx, that's 12:00 AM here in my country. Are there other schedules aside from that one above? If there's none, I'll strive to join. Maybe, I'll just set an alarm at that moment, so sorry if I'm groggy or unresponsive during that time. Hahaha.

@imprisonedindarkness: Oh no, please don't ruin your sleep! Well, if this thing works, I can do it in the morning as well, maybe some time next week. I there enough peopel interested that is.

Thanks imprisoned person.

Oh, I'm sorry friends, something totally unplanned came up. I'll be late and I do apologise, let's make it 5:30 please. I'll do my best to be here as early as possible, but things are somewhat out of my hand. I'll be around for sure, only a bit later than announced. Thanks a million for understanding. See you all on Sunday.