Hi, I have an interview I performed over my smartphone using a voice recorder app.
The person on the other end of the line came out very quiet compared to my voice. I am going through the interview and amplifying, which is working fine, but her voice sounds tinny. It almost sounds like she was on speaker phone, which she wasn’t.
Does anyone have any tips for how to improve her voice quality? I am a beginner, and so far Amplify is the only trick I have. Poking around trying everything out was taking a lot of time, and the language used in the manual is foreign to me as a beginner.
Basically, what are good initial steps to take to improve a tinny voice from a cell phone recording?
Personal Recorders don’t record both sides of the conversation. Just you. Her side was the leakage and echo cancellation errors on your cellphone which is why it sounds terrible. If that was working correctly, she wouldn’t be there at all.
You should find an app that actually records both sides… and then post back and tell us how you did it.
I use an actual physical microphone I put in my ear, but it requires a separate computer.
So while it was an app, her side is not miserably bad for something like dictation or court evidence. It would be fine for that. It just is not great for a podcast of the interview.I mean, I could just amplify her voice, and it would “pass.” Thing is, I like things to be better than passing. I want her to sound great.
I am new to Audio recording, but am hoping that this interview will lead to more. I am expecting a huge learning curve in the future.
Skype into a laptop running Pamela. You can get top quality split WAV recordings that way assuming you’re both wearing headphones. Throw a little money and Skype will connect to a telephone or cellphone system and connect to multi-point conferences.
I did a very nice Skype interview “test” with two computers rather than Pamela and the far end wasn’t even wearing headphones. My test assistant four time zones away was just talking into her Mac Air. I really need to figure out where I left those sound clips. They came out far better than I was expecting them to.
Cellphones are heavily biased to bad sound because everybody expects them to work with both parties yelling at their phones a foot in front of their face. Both phones need to be in heavy echo cancellation to force that to work at all and that delay, switching, muting and sound management just doesn’t sound very good.
This is where you post some of the original interview. It’s possible we can beef it up. Also post the same clip after you leveled it. You can only post five seconds or so of WAV stereo on the forum (ten seconds mono). Much longer in MP3, but that’s not useful because of MP3 sound damage.
