I download the Car Talk podcast, cut it down, compress the volume range with Chris’s Compressor to be more like the broadcast volume range and export a mono WAV sound file. Or that’s what I used to do. The last two weeks I tried Chris’s Compressor, the cut timeline would flash once and nothing would happen. No compression and as far as I can tell, no change to the show.
I don’t know of any significant changes to the machine. I’ve been doing this for years.
Chris’s settings are default except the first value, Compress Ratio which is changed from 0.5 to 0.77 or 0.78. The program is release 2 or version 1.2.6 depending on how you count.
It fails in Audacity 2.1.0. I saved a project, opened it in Audacity 2.1.2 and that fails. I moved the Project to another machine and those two versions fail as well. I Exported a WAV (Microsoft), opened it in one of the Audacity versions and that succeeded. I don’t remember which version. I ran out of time to mess with it.
As I suspected, there are too many zeros in the beginning (digital silence). Just remove a part of it, it will work afterwards.
Robert
PS.
I like the one with the “Floaty Loops” for breakfast.
Otherwise, the error message is not very helpful–got the same one. However, trust me, the zeros are the cause (are they eatable too?)
Except I put those there. The show has a long preamble and a bunch of introduction stuff I don’t want. So I drag-select some portion immediately in front of the valuable work and silence it with Command-L. Then I trim a part of that fresh silence along with all the trash and that becomes my new start.
Earlier shows didn’t need the Command-L because the production didn’t snug unwanted work right up against the valuable work. The older edits consisted purely of drag and delete.
Is this a formerly unknown rule for Command-L? Thou shalt not put it at the beginning of a show? How do I perform that edit?
It’s basically a rule for Chris’ compressor–it has difficulties with any start, I think.
you could normalize the beginning to -120 dB or generate noise there or…
A few zeroes are allowed. The float loop goes up to 10000, it seems. The program tries to fit a parabola to the amplitude over a certain window length. This works only if there is at least one non-zero value. Decreasing the hardness might also be an option.
“Amplify” is limited to +/- 50 dB. For more than that you have to apply the effect multiple times. Normalize does not have that limitation.
The easiest workaround for this limitation (in Chris’ Compressor) is to avoid including absolute silence (or “white space”) at the start of the selection. If the track has nothing but absolute silence for the first 6 seconds, start the selection from the 6 second mark.
I can certify it won’t do -60. I also have evidence of it acting oddly. Generate Noise at 0.3 amplitude, Amplify it -40dB and rejoice in a -20dB noise track.
This has not gone well.
Rather than beat this up at great length, I’m going to do all the editing except the front, compress and then cut it off. Same labor, different order.
It was. They went their several decades of production and then stopped. One of them died. The shows are now “Classic Car Talk” repeats.
I’m not automobilophile.
The cars are almost completely beside the point. I don’t think they accept callers unless they also have marital or other problems.
“I think there’s a raccoon living in the trunk of my car. No, no. He’s fine there, I want to know if I should tell my husband.”
That caller appeared in the “third half” of the show.
And etc.
The history of the show has one of them doing a tiny, local car call-in program and he got in over his head and asked his brother to stop by briefly to help out. It was one of those magic broadcast marriages.
And that’s the magic. It’s possible it only does that at the beginning of my Car Talk Project. I need to set it up again and get repeatable conditions.
For a while there I had a poisoned magic wand. Everything I tried either failed or did something unexpected and not useful.