Nuking Defaults

Special Interest Groups Recording Techniques
1

When you launch a fresh Audacity, which defaults do you immediately change as a natural reflex?

  1. 32-floating to 16-bit.
  2. Mono to Stereo (if applicable).
  3. Always copy music to the Project.
  4. Deselect Update Display while Playing.
  5. 4096 Spectrogram.

– Less Universal –

  1. Add Lame.
  2. Add Chris’s Compressor

– Way Personal –

– I personally like 48000 instead of 44100.
– I personally change Chris’s Compressor to .77 compression, up from .5.

Way, way, way at the bottom of the list is adding ffMpeg. I use it manually, but I’m going to be forced into adding it to a working Audacity sooner or later.

Koz

2

First of all I don’t need to do anything to the preferences since I don’t trash the preferences. But, since this seems to be a poll:

  1. 32-floating to 16-bit. Check
  2. Mono to Stereo (if applicable). Check
  3. Always copy music to the Project. Check
  4. Deselect Update Display while Playing. Nope
  5. 4096 Spectrogram. Check

– Less Universal –

  1. Add Lame. Check

But I do need to move stuff to the new plugins folder. Actually, I just copy the plugins folder from the old version to the new version so I’ve still got everything I previously installed.

  1. Add Chris’s Compressor Check This shows up as “Compress Dynamics” in the Effect menu, right?

Also:

  1. Add Fast Lookahead Limiter

– Bill

3

<But, since this seems to be a poll:> Hey, I like polls too … :slight_smile:

First of all I don’t need to do anything to the preferences since I don’t trash the preferences. Check

  1. 32-floating to 16-bit. No, I leave this as default for editing headroom (and downsample on export to 16-bit WAV with triangular dithering)
  2. Mono to Stereo (if applicable). Check
  3. Always copy music to the Project. Check - and I still think this should ne the “safe” default OOTB
  4. Deselect Update Display while Playing. No
  5. 4096 Spectrogram. I have never changed this (can either of you please explain the pros and cons of resetting this to the “most narrowband” setting)

– Less Universal –

  1. Add Lame. Check though I rarely export to MP3 these days, preferring to Export WAV and convert that in my iTunes to AAC

  2. Add Chris’s Compressor. No I don’t like to compress the recordings I make from LPs and tapes - and the ones I record off-air FM are already compressed by the BBC

Also:

  1. Add Fast Lookahead Limiter - no idea what this does :question:

Additionally.

  1. Uncheck: Show Metadata Editor prior to export step (I can’t be doing with all that “frenzy of clicking” as one recent poster charmingly described it. I deal with metadata editing in iTunes once I get the music files in there.)

WC

4

<<8. Add Fast Lookahead Limiter - no idea what this does >>
From Steve Harris at plugin.org.uk. Mac and Unix only at the moment (and the Mac versions are three years old). “This is a limiter with an attack time of 5ms. It adds just over 5ms of latency to the input signal, but it guarantees that there will be no signals over the limit, and tries to get the minimum amount of distortion.”

<<9. Uncheck: Show Metadata Editor prior to export step (I can’t be doing with all that “frenzy of clicking” as one recent poster charmingly described it. I deal with metadata editing in iTunes once I get the music files in there.)>>
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If I’m exporting MP3s it actually is useful, despite the ‘frenzy of clicking’. First, go to File > Open Metadata Editor and enter everything except the track titles. Then on export multiple, Audacity cleverly fills in the Track Name field using the label. Handy some times. But for AIFFs, I turn it off.

– Bill

5

Quite often I will use a “Portable Settings” folder so that I can run multiple versions of Audacity for testing.
Initially I’ll start with the default values for everything so that I can test a default install. If it looks good and I want to actually start using it, then I make the following changes:

Length of preview > 6 seconds
Preview before / after cut regions > 3 seconds

(For microphone recording, set number of channels to 1)

Ergonomic order of I/O buttons
Meter dB range > 96 dB
(Enable cut lines - sometimes - not decided about this one yet, but can be useful sometimes)
Solo button > Simple

Show Metadata editor > OFF (I always change this)

Set Lame and FFMpeg libraries (though usually just work with WAV)

FFT window size > 1024
Display Max frequency > 16000