This is for some scientific research I’m doing, so time is of essence.
I have a file recorded in .wav, but unfortunately the quality is horrible. I’m not sure of the reason as I’m not super tech-savvy, but it seems as it the sampling speed was too slow, so chunks of information/sound are lost. Is there some way to smooth or repair this file?
Guess it would help if I actually attached the file!
There’s a lot of things that can cause that problem. Basically some part of your system cannot keep up with the amount of audio data . See here for some of the common causes and possible solutions: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Troubleshooting_Recordings#Skips
The recording problem has been solved, so it’s no longer an issue for the future. However, I have a set of 10 voice samples that I can’t replicate (the subjects can’t be recalled within such a short time span) so I was wondering if there was some way to use Audacity to “fill in” the skips or something?
You can try using the Effect > Truncate Silence to remove/shorten the silences/gaps
You will need to play with the parameters - you’ll probably want to reduce the Min duration, increase the Max duration and increase the Silence Compression ratio.
A quick expeiment on your 12 second MP3 sample reduced it down to about 9 seconds with the silences “removed” - still poor quality audio, but without the gaps …
WC