Here Comes Trebble

A nifty web audio app

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Trebble is the name of a nifty web audio app that lets you not just edit but augment recordings in your browser. It works best in Chrome. You upload spoken text, which is automatically transcribed (and, yes, is prone to error — and yes, we’re being trained by our speech-to-text tools to enunciate with greater precision, and yes, I do find new reasons to rewatch Francis Ford Coppola’s *The Conversation* pretty much every day in our ever more increasingly technologically mediated world). You can then — magically, as it were — edit the audio by editing the text. That is: If you want to remove a clause from the audio, you either cut it or instruct Trebble to ignore it. You can also remove noise and — this is pretty cool — add music to select moments within the track. And when you’re satisfied with the result, you can output the recording for subsequent use, with all the edits and other augmentations in place. Trebble is clearly still in beta. The interface reminds me a bit of what you can do in rev.com’s transcription service, but the editing and enhancement is something else entirely. It’s still early going for Trebble, but the user experience provides an upstream view of what’s ahead. Tools like this quite quickly go from web novelties to universal norms. *(Found via the always excellent [webaudioweekly.com](https://webaudioweekly.com).)*

Try it out at [trebble.fm](https://trebble.fm)

twitter.com/disquiet: Self-Publishing & Moby Dick

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner [in expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2022/09/28/back-to-the-1990s/) or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ New household sound since starting to get the Sunday New York Times delivered for the first time in over a decade: it slamming against the front gate at 1:57am.

▰ Flashing back to my self-publishing chronology:

• High school newspaper
• College music mag
• Zines at Kinko’s
• Early ’90s FTP site
• Early ’90s email newsletter
• Early ’90s generic URL site
• Minicomics
• Disquiet.com (since 1996)
• Social media
• This Week in Sound

▰ Life was easier when my newsletter publishing tool was the bcc line. And then Majordomo (which apparently turns 30 this year).

▰ Hi-res NASA footage:

▰ I just like that somehow Ethan Hein ([ethanhein.com](https://ethanhein.com)) and Todd Elliott ([thelithole.com](https://thelithole.com)) are reading *Moby Dick* at the exact same time. I need to get on this ship.

▰ I initially thought all the Nord news was about Russia shutting down the VPN. I was also just waking up.

▰ After using DALL·E 2 for the first time for an hour straight, every time I see an image — any image, like a photo in a newspaper or a piece of art hanging on the living room wall — my first thought is, “What phrase conjured this?”

▰ It’s been over a month since the third (er um can I say “eventful” without being too spoilery?) episode of season 7 of *Shetland*. Anyone have a sense (in the former colonies known as the U.S.A.) when this unintelligible-to-me-without-captions Scottish import will continue? (It’s on Amazon Prime.) Bonus points for graphic-novel plot. Bonus bonus points for whoever put a book by regional hero Frank Quitely in one of the early scenes.

▰ Me experimenting with leaving the period off the end of a sentence because I hear they scare children

▰ Most years: It’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Nick Lowe is playing for free really close to home!

Last two years: The pandemic = Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is a window on my laptop.

This year: It’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Adrian Belew is playing for free really close to home!

▰ Strange. It’s happened twice recently where someone (whom I follow and who also follows me) replied to one of my tweets, but I didn’t see it in twitter.com/notifications. I only happened to notice that the tweet had some activity, so I clicked on it and saw the response there.

▰ I know it’s Friday because I just tried to power my Tic Tacs with my charging cable instead of my AirPods