Hi, can someone please help a basic user of Audacity? I am digitising all my old vinyl records of classical music (of various kinds), which works fine. But sometimes the orchestral sound is distorted - not necessarily loud or high pitch sounds. I have tried exporting using 32-bit float rather than 16 bit PCM, and while it is better, it is still far from perfect. What might be the best solution?
Did you normalise the tracks before exporting them?
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I tried it once but was not sure that it helped. Is that the usual way to avoid the problem?
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It’s one way, for sure. You don’t mention how things are connected up so it’s not clear what the possible causes are. Are you willing to share one of your project files for me to see first hand? That might help me.
Sure, tomorrow
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I have shared two projects with you on Google Drive
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As soon as I opened and played the project I could see what the problem was. On the left where it shows the track details like Mute, Solo & Effects you have two sliders. The top one was set to +25dB on one project and +28dB on the other - I NEVER mess with these. Playback was in the red area almost the whole time. I set each to the centre (0.0dB) and the distortion went away. I applied click removal and normalised them using the default settings. They are better. However, there is a lot of noise which I suspect could be greatly improved by giving your LPs a damn good clean.
The versions with my tweaks are on their way to you via SwissTransfer.com. You will get an email when the download is available.
Hope that all helped.
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Many thanks for that. I have a slow internet connection so have not managed to download the files yet. What puzzles me, though, is that the sliders in question are for playback, not for the audio download. How does it make a difference? Anyway, I will normalise the projects in future. Thanks again
I should say that yes, some of the records are very old, and have obviously been played many times. Others are in very good condition and seem very clean