Rod Janpol is a working fool. And my hero.
One definition of a hero fits Rod exactly: “a person admired for outstanding achievements or noble qualities.”
Mr. Janpol has invested frighteningly-long hours engineering my upcoming audio book DeForest Kelley Up Close and Personal From the Fan Who Knew Him Best. He took on the task because we’re friends and because he met De and loves him, to this day, every bit as much as I do.
Initially I asked him merely to add brief seconds of “air time” before and after each chapter (to mirror the format of other professionally-produced audio books). We both thought the task would be a snap.
But when I sent him the audio files he realized he could correct 99.999% of the issues that my less-than-professional recording studio had introduced into the mix. There was white noise, some popping, and other stuff going on that he could hear and knew he could do something about… and he wanted to do it.
There was also the HUGE challenge of cleaning up decades-old voicemail messages that had been captured on older, all-but-obsolete technology (vinyl tapes in the voicemail unit transferred to vinyl tapes on an ancient tape recorder). Those fixes alone took days and days.
The beeps between each voicemail message (and there had to be close to a hundred voicemail messages, all told) had to be either toned down (to keep from deafening the listener) or eliminated. They also had to be changed to mono from stereo and compressed.
I don’t have a clue what all this means or what it took to get it done (other than lots of time, effort and intense attention to detail!), but I do know Rod IM’d me frequently, day and night, letting me know of his technical challenges and progress.
This was his first experience producing an audio book; he says it was an amazing experience and a wonderful training ground.
He exhibited the patience of Job every day, every step of the way, too. No hiccup or setback upset his equanimity.
And here’s the thing: I felt that what I had sent him originally was “good enough” in the quality department–something I could proudly put my name on. But when he sent me a sample of how much better it could be, I was floored and delighted. So I gave him the go-ahead to do whatever he felt was needed to make it as great as it could be.
Yesterday Rod thought he had it wrapped up. Then we realized that he didn’t have the last fifteen minutes or so of voicemail messages from the Kelleys because I had failed to write ‘Side Two’ on the vinyl audiotape I sent him, so he thought all of the voice mail messages were on Side One. (My bad!) So he still had to clean those up–minimize the background noise to enhance the quality of the messages, remove or lessen the decibel level of the beeps between each message, and compress them.
(We realized belatedly, while chatting on IM, that he hadn’t even heard many of the messages I was mentioning to him, including some of the most important and poignant ones that had occurred while I was caring for De in the hospital. That’s when we figured out what had happened! He turned the tape over and found an additional treasure trove of messages, including messages from A.C. Lyles, Harve Bennett, and Teresa Victor.)
So he’s at it again today. I expect he’ll have it completed and dropped into my Dropbox real soon so Lisa Twining Taylor can finalize the YellowBalloonPublications.com site and connect the various book options to Paypal so fans can start ordering the audio book or the PDF versions of the book.
What a guy. Talk about going “above and beyond”!
In a single sound bite, Rod Janpol is a prince, a champ, a great friend, and my hero!
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(Please Note: The audio and PDF versions are ONLY available from Yellow Balloon Publications.)
The other versions (Kindle and two soft cover editions, one with full color images inside and one with black and white images inside) are already available at Amazon and so far they’ve received 100% 5-star reviews.
