I recorded a podcast through a mixer with an xlr connected mic. The main out of the mixer went into my windows 10 pc with a griffin technologies imic and recorded with standard voice recorder (I will be using this new found Audacity form now on). I recorded about an hour of a podcast and ran it through Audacity to try and normalize the voice volumes.
My problem is that I can play the podcast on my iphone and hear it just fine (although quality sucks its arguably usable) with headphones in. But if I take the headphones out and use just speaker built into the iphone you cant hear anything hardly. I have tried 3 different iphones, an ipad and an android with same results. Listening to the podcast with speaker just does not want to work for whatever reason. I even tried downloading the file to the devices with same results.
Is it a stereo file? I’m guessing your left & right channels are out-of-phase so they cancel when mixed to mono.
Click the little drop-down arrow to the left of the waveforms and select Split Stereo Track. That will allow you to edit the left & right channels independently. Select either the left or right track (either one) and go to Effects and Invert one channel. Now, you can export as mono or stereo and it should work.
xlr connected mic. The main out of the mixer went into my windows 10 pc with a griffin technologies imic
And, that’s the root of your problem… You connected a (mono) balanced (3-wire) microphone to a stereo input. In a balanced connection the two signal connections are “push-pull” (opposite polarity/phase).
If you want to use a good studio/stage microphone you need an [u]audio interface[/u] with the proper low-impedance, balanced, XLR connection.
Or, you could get a [u]microphone transformer[/u] to convert the 3-wire balanced connection to a 2-wire unbalanced connection, and match the impedance. (Most of these have 1/4-inch phone plugs for a guitar amp so you’d need an additional adapter-cable.)
That was exactly it Doug. Thanks a lot. I spent hours trying to figure this out. I will read up on audio phase and try to figure out what is setup wrong and look into the equipment you suggested. Thanks again!
I will read up on audio phase and try to figure out what is setup wrong and look into the equipment you suggested.
Don’t look-up “phase”. That might not be the technically-correct term and you’ll find a lot of irrelevant information.
Look-up “balanced audio connection”.
Maybe I can give you some more information later, but I gotta’ get back to work now. The short story is that studio/stage microphones use a different interface/connection than “computer microphones”.
P.S.
Check [u]Wikipedia[/u]. There’s a tiny picture showing red & blue wires and red & blue waveforms (representing voltage). Notice that the red & blue waveforms are “opposites”.
The (mono) microphone has 3-wires - Two differential signal wires and a ground.
Your (stereo) iMic interface also has 3 wires - A left-signal wire, a right-signal wire and ground.
The “stereo” adapter you’re using sends one of the microphone signals to the left channel and an inverted signal to the right channel. When those signals are mixed to mono they cancel each other.
You can see this error in Audacity. Pick a spot in the dialog and keep magnifying the blue waves until you see the individual up and down humps.
On your show, the humps will be going in opposite directions like that. That’s not normal for a show. Mix the two in a mono speaker (iPod, iPhone) and they cancel. In stereo, they will be heard, but might sound like the show is coming from behind you.
The error is old news, but I wonder where it’s coming from. The balanced microphone has nothing to do with this. Did you adapt an XLR connection on the mixer to the iMic? That would do it. Those two are fundamentally different. Does the mixer have Tape Out like this one?
to see what cables I actually have and what I am doing.
We can sometimes roll right over you and we won’t stop until somebody says they’re lost or requires more information.
Yes, by all means. We live on product descriptions and model numbers. Keep the receipts. Pretend you’re telling your sister in Schenectady how to build a recording system identical to yours.
There are totally ways of recording a good quality microphone that automatically create this problem by accident. And it has magic attributes. Sometimes the show works and sometimes it doesn’t…
