It’s been three years since my initial encounter with iZotope and audio editing.

Tonight, I am looking back on those first tries and failures, and how my then colleague, now friend, patiently walked me through the basics and answered endless questions. 

And I can’t help but smile.

In those first few months I learned a whole lot about myself, what I can and can’t do, and how many failures it takes to get the hang of something completely new.  

Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of practice and in the process of audio editing I came across some situations that looked a lot like life lessons, even if they came in the form of sound waves.

I thought it would be fun to share some of those with you.

There are quite a few of them, so I will share them one by one in the coming weeks.

Here’s the first one – you can’t fix everything.

Believe me, I tried! 

Sometimes there simply isn’t enough time to fix all the little, almost unnoticeable issues.  Other times, not even the best tool available can fix an issue while still maintaining the natural flow of the audio track.  There are those situations where the issue is so close to the treasure, that you can’t remove or alter one without the other.

Life seems to follow the same pattern.  Limited time.  Trade-offs.  Mess and treasure needing to co-exist.  Issues that are different from the tools we have in our toolkit.  Always needing to make decisions, learn, grow, move forward without having it all figured out, move on and leave things behind.

Always prioritizing, weighing, adjusting.

A never-ending self-initiated inquiry of “can” and “should.” 

Can I do this?  Should I do this?  Is it even mine to do this? 

Not everything needs to be fixed. 

Some imperfections stay, not because you don’t care, but because priorities matter.

So, frame them in a creative way and make them part of the whole, and if you can give them meaning, then you can even make them complement the story.

Whatever you do, keep moving forward.