So I had recorded some very poor audio and am in the process of trying to fix it. First, it has some static in the recording for some reason likely due to the usb mic. And this static seems to be worse when the loudness of the person talking kicks in. I was able to reduce the static sound but i still get quite a bit distortion when he is loud. I tried clip fix, but it was not that effective. This was recorded with audacity over a blue yeti microphone on Win7.
This is a edited recording sample:
This is the sample of the original (quite loud):
I am very new at audacity or editing sound in general, and wondered if someone may be able to help me isolate the main speaker from the distortion.
Clip Fix can help mask one occasional clip every minute or so, not several minutes of continuous distortion.
Overload and clipping is one of the reliable ways to destroy a show. During the harsh, crunchy passages of the show, the digital audio system is not following the performer. There is no clean performance to “reveal.”
You or the recordist must have been doing something really unusual, because the two stereo sound tracks don’t match, they overload before channel clipping and nobody ever complains about a Yeti being too loud. You have a celebrity shoot. If you know who shot it, you might call and tell them to stop doing it that way.
This leads me to believe there may be a clean copy of the show somewhere. That you got a badly damaged copy.
You can mask some of the harsh crispeness by muffling the sound. Effect > Low Pass Filter: 5000Hz, 12dB.
I actually shot and recorded this myself. I am not sure why the Yeti struggled with the loudness, as the gain was a little less than halfway on the mic itself. I did notice as I was shooting that the Left side had a much higher amplitude. The mic was directly in front of the speaker about 5ft away from his face. With the yeti plugged in USB to a laptop using audacity straight “out of the box” to record. On the original to get the waveform in (1-21) I did a Low Pass Filter at 3000 Hz, -30db with basically just the EQ. I also used the noise removal and attenuated the signal.
I just got the Yeti last week. I am very new at this and it is very possible that I may be doing something wrong while recording. I think that the static noise is due to the mic drawing poor quality power from the laptop through usb? Maybe a usb hub with it’s own power supply would help? The man’s voice was quite booming and It sounds like the levels were just too loud for the mic?
Any info, help, or links to information would be greatly appreciated.
“I cranked everything up and I can’t get good volume from my Yeti.”
Audacity doesn’t do anything in real time, so no gain or volume controls. Also Audacity gets its sound from Windows, not the computer. Some machines have a 20dB gain boost option and you might look in the Windows control panels and see if you can find it. I can’t explain the left-right unbalance at all. Some early Windows versions had a balance control in the control panels. I had one like that.
We’re normally telling people to snuggle up to their microphones and talk louder to get the volume up. You have a celebrity problem. 3000Hz is the sound quality of a telephone. 5000 is AM radio, so you had to hack off a lot of the crispness and clarity to get rid of the harshness.
There is no reason my mic should have different channels left/right. And I think the static is due to the mini usb into the mic itself or perhaps the cord, as I have tried the mic on different computers in different locations. I think I will try getting a new one from Amazon and perhaps reshooting. I am going to try using the powered usb hub suggested by joel96 in the thread linked and maybe a double shielded cable.
Could you please confirm that the setup I was using seems right and that I wasn’t doing anything strange? Thanks so much for your help!