Can someone help me? I have an audio here that is too sharp, i don’t have the skills to make it less sharpy and more smooth (on audacity of course): play it on max, it becomes painful (so painful to listen to, decreasing the volume is not an option)
The ‘sharpness’ you describe is actually clipping from being recorded at too high levels. To see what I mean re-open your file in Audacity then go to View and select ‘Show Clipping in Waveform’. You will see an awful lot of red there which you don’t want. Select the entire audio clip and go to Effect > Volume & Compression > Normalize. When that finishes, the red will be gone. Play it again now and see if that sounds the way you want it. If it does, save it and/or export it again.
Hope that helps.
Mark B
If the original is clipped (distorted) normalizing or otherwise reducing the volume will NOT change the wave shape and fix the clipping. It will simply “hide it” from Audacity.
But you can try the Clip Fix effect, after normalizing. …When I tried it a couple of times it made the waveform look better but it didn’t really improve the sound. And, there’s no way to know the original unclipped wave height or wave shape. But you may have better luck.
Audacity “shows red” for potential clipping. It’s just looking at the peak levels, not the wave shape. You can get false positives and false negatives.
If you have actual clipping, lowering the volume with the Normalize or Amplify effect can lower the level so it doesn’t show red and “hide” the clipping (a false negative).
Or… Audacity uses floating point internally. It has virtually no upper (or limit) so Audacity itself won’t clip. For example, if you boost the bass and the peaks go over 0dB, Audacity will show red but it’s not really clipped yet (false positive). You’ll clip your DAC if you play it at “full digital volume”, and if you export as a regular WAV file, the exported file will be clipped. BUT if you normalize BEFORE exporting everything will be OK.
That’s very useful information. Thanks, I think.
As for all the other stuff, if it’s got me scratching my head, imagine what it did for the original poster. I guess I should have tried playing it louder but it was early in the morning and I’m one of those rare people that actually considers my neighbours. Pity they don’t do the same for me.
Mark B