We represent a local historical society. We purchased an RCA digital voice recorder to record oral history interviews of the elderly people in our community. We quickly found out that VOC files stink. Would prefer to learn how to convert them to WAV or MP3 files and then edit them - cut, clip, excerpt, delete dead spaces, etc. If anyone can find it in their heart to help us please let me know. We’re not knowledgeable in audio editing, so please keep that in mind. Is Audacity the tool we need to learn or are we in the wrong spot?
Thank you so much,
Ron from The Greater Pittston Historical Society
Probably in the right place, but why do you think they stink? That gets our attention because the quality of the sound is never going to get any better than the capture. You can’t open a ratty voice file in Audacity and magically have it sound like Glenn Glen Sound Studios. It doesn’t work that way – and recording “straight” voice is a lot harder than every one thinks. Those NPR radio interviews and PBS specials go to significant extra effort to make the sound come out right.
Install Audacity the normal way and also install the FFMpeg software. FFMpeg is the software that greatly expands Audacity’s ability to open different sound files.
I don’t remember if there was anything magic about VOC files. Somebody else will jump in.
You could also have a look at the RCA download page at http://www.rcaaudiovideo.com/downloads/ Maybe they have some download available for your particular recorder?
Alternatively, you might want to try your luck with the following free utilities:
NCH Switch (“free for home use”) also uses a “devoc.exe” and can convert from RCA VOC to WAV on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. I have not tested the Mac version of Switch.
Don’t know if this is still problematic for the o.p., but
the RCA .voc format is not the same as that for Creative Labs.
According to Audiovox (they made the unit for RCA it appears) if you record in HQ mode the files will be in WAV format., and