Hi, I have a noisy neighbor, he loves to sit in his car in his yard and blast the low frequency bass beat music. were both on 1 acre tracks so he’s blasting me from (300) feet away, thumps through my walls, floor & windows, Florida does not like using the decibel meters in court. do you have anything that can record the low frequency audio so I can play it in court? he’s pretty slick, he keeps an eye out for the Sheriff, Sheriff comes he turns it off, they cannot pin point it, so theres nothing they can do without hearing it & pin pointing it themselves, looks like recording it is my next step to ease my pain
You’ve got this in the wrong place… It’s not about programming.
There’s a disclaimer somewhere about using Audacity for legal purposes.
It’s kind-of useless without SPL level… Most microphones can pick-up low frequencies but then you need some big subwoofers to reproduce it and you can’t prove the playback volume is the same as the original volume.
A “regular” SPL meter won’t be admissible either. You’d need a calibrated SPL meter that logs sound levels.
And SPL regulations might not even cover it. Bass tends to be annoying, even at low levels (if it’s not your bass 
and it goes-though walls and travels farther than mid & high frequencies. So it could be legal but still annoying…
Spectrogram display on Audacity could show when the bass noise occurred, but not how loud it actually was.
Audacity can’t be used for Surveillance, Law Enforcement or Conflict Resolution. You can use it to give yourself a warm, fuzzy feeling, but you can’t show the work or sound files to anybody else.
I suspect that’s why Florida doesn’t like that very much. You don’t show up in court with a disco sound system. You show up with a document from a sound measurement company certifying that your neighbor has violated city regulations and ordinances for nuisance noise production.
I think our local laws demand quiet between 7am and 10PM, something like that. So if you’re going to put a new foundation for your house next door, you really need to pay attention.
This is a common request.
It’s not magic, either. We had both of our movie screening rooms certified by such a company.
Koz
There’s room here for a dig about not wanting to live in California with all those rules and regulations…
There is something you can do by yourself. Rent a sound system and compete with him. You could feed his own sound back to him a couple of seconds late.
There’s a Hollywood solution, too. Hire costumed actors to drive by every 20 minutes or so and scribble in clipboards.
Koz
There’s another one. From DVDDoug above…
SPL regulations might not even cover it.
Regulations and Ordinances are written in dB-SPL (A). In English, Sound Pressure Level - A doesn’t measure low pitched sounds such as thunder, earthquakes, trains, and large trucks going by. Those, while annoying, won’t harm your hearing. The stuff in the middle range: baby screaming on a jet, fingernails on blackboard, industrial lathes, cutters and metal forming machines will damage your hearing over time.
You don’t have dB-SPL (A) noises.
Koz
Back here on earth. Have you tried to record it? It’s not fun. Microphones and systems that can record disco also record wind noises which will destroy your recordings.
If your goal is to shoot voices for a movie with good quality, the first thing you do is apply the microphone’s rumble filter. That’s the last thing you want. Your performance is rumble.
If you try to record the sound leaking into your rooms, you’ll find that the natural internal noise of most home microphones will cover up the noise. The noise is quieter than you think and home microphones tend to record quiet straight out of the box, so the combination isn’t good. It will give you a ratty sound file.
Any neighbors bothered by this?
Koz