Is it possible to record sections of a Glyssen Script that span verse or punctuation

I’d like to know if the software can be configured for
is the ability to record multiple segments in one go. We are testing with
the book of Ruth and I had someone record the parts for Naomi this morning.
We had to record each segment of her monologues in isolation instead of the
entire monologue. This affects that way the voice actor says each part. Is
there a configuration setting we can use that would instruct HearThis to
bundle the contiguous segments of a character into one segment?

There might be a hack that @tom_bogle knows of, but the short answer is no. Sorry!

As John says, HearThis does not currently support this. Assuming the whole next block is visible in the context below the block you’re recording, you could read both and then skip the following one, but there are at least two good reasons not to do this (it’s a confusing, unreliable, and error-prone workflow; plus it would leave HearThis puzzled as to what you had and hadn’t been recorded, which will almost certainly lead to problems down the road). Anyway, that’s unlikely to meet your actual need. So, short of some kind of hack where you would actually remove periods from the text, it’s just not possible. (There are even more reasons what that’s a bad idea.)
But the limitation is not just technical. There are some practical challenges with trying to do this also. If you record whole paragraphs, you very well might get a better flow and more natural sounding intonation. But, especially for relatively new readers (which make up a relatively high percentage of HearThis users), it’s quite difficult to read sentence after sentence completely error-free. If HearThis let you pack several sentences together, the longer the text got, the higher the likelihood the reader would make a mistake and have to re-record the whole thing. At some point, the potential benefit starts to break down. (Indeed, a while back we actually added the opposite feature to allow readers to break a long sentence in half and record in it two parts.) The other thing is that reading itself typically results in less natural sounding speech. If a recordist can read a sentence through a few times in order to more-or -less memorize it before recording, they can achieve a naturalness that is more like what you get with the “prompter technique” that IMS promotes. Obviously, with a longer text, that’s not going to be nearly as easy.
All that said, if you have some recordists who are pretty good readers, the best bet might be to use a different tool instead of HearThis for recording their parts. Right now, that probably means Audacity or Audition, and the complexity of working out a doable hybrid approach where some stuff is recorded in HearThis and some parts are recorded elsewhere is probably well beyond most of our teams. We are working with FCBH to produce a more full-featured recording tool called Encore. It’s probably at least several months away, but I think it will meet your needs when it becomes available. Although this may not be available in version 1, our ultimate aim is to support teams using Encore and HearThis in a hybrid manner.
We will note your need as a feature request, but most likely, we’ll wait for Encore and see how well it addresses that need.

Thanks Tom. If it isn’t necessary to do text highlighting, it is possible to record blocks in groups of three. I picked a block that had the same speaker speaking one block before and one block after and recorded the speaker speaking all three blocks. Then I instructed Hearthis to ‘skip’ blocks 1 and 3. As my colleague Tim A pointed out, this wouldn’t work if you wanted the text highlighted, but it could be a useful method if that’s not necessary.
Of course you could record a larger chunk by making the larger monologue available for viewing outside of hearthis and just record the whole thing from the first block…skipping all the rest. Again, that only works if you don’t want text highlighting.

There is another potential problem besides the loss of text highlighting (which you could hope to get anyway if you sue Aeneas as part of your SAB process). We hope to enhance HearThis to do a better job of dealing with text changes. But for that to work well, HearThis will actually need to know the truth about what is recorded in each clip. Since you’re essentially lying to HT about what you’re recording, that could cause confusion later. Of course, since you’re recording from a Glyssen script, the chances are far less that you’ll have significant changes to the text dribbling in for the next few months. And if you finish your whole recording process before anyone gets around to implementing that new feature in HT, it probably won’t affect you. So I’m not saying you can’t do it, but I just want to raise the alert (especially for others who might try to follow in your footsteps) that there could be issues with this workaround, so you’re kind of on your own if you paint yourself into a corner.