It was through the headphones and electronics. Yes, it’s time to get her back in the loop. I have simply found it easier to record than to track her down and get her to do it.
I can easily dial it back a little on the gain. Today I will get Jerreth to do a recording.
We had another spectacular storm last night. This time, it took down a large, 30’ limb from a tree by our chicken coop. The crack and bang as it hit the ground was quite loud. I had to go out at 2:00 AM to clear branches off of our pasture fence. Otherwise, come morning, we might have had goats in the back yard. We have probably had a foot of precipitation in the last week. It is still good for Oklahoma, after the years of drought. But… I am ready for a couple of sunny days now
Uh oh something broke. Note how the character of the hum is different and much louder now. Now you don’t just have 120 Hz, we have significant amounts of 180, 300, 420, 540, 660, and 780 much more annoying because it covers the whole speech spectrum.
Florescent lamps are probably the most likely source of this sort of noise, but there is other AC power equipment that can generate it as well.
What changed?
(PS: Feel free to ship some of that rain to California…)
I’ll bet there’s folks in Oklahoma that think of California as beaches and palm trees.
It’s not?
but about 1/4" in my mason jar
I think we did better down here in the Tsunami Zone. Rain pounding on the roof and my plant pots are overflowing.
One of the other posters in this gaggle had the psycho-acoustic problem of the tiniest bit of mmmmmmm in the show which did pass the ACX challenge, but didn’t sound very good. He got rid of his beer cooler and the hum went away. His background noise actually didn’t change all that much, but turned into gentle, rain-in-the-trees shshshshshshshshshs.
The sound that they put in those machines to make you sleep.
Perfect.
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Buried somewhere in the ACX videos, there’s a thing about background noise. They recommend a straight 30 second recording which you don’t even have to be there for. Then play it back and crank the volume up. If it’s not gentle rain, then you may have room noises and if they don’t create problems now, they will later.
"I need to apply the compressor to increase my speaking volume. Dang! Where did that buzz come from?
Now that I think about it, it’s actually much worse than that. When you cut and edit the presentation, you can’t have any gaps or silent stretches. You can have theatrical pauses or silent stretches for tension and suspense, but if you make them, you’ll have to make them hum. Nothing like building the audience attention up in the monolog and then having the pause sound like you hung up the phone or had a glitch or technical problem.
Grathwahl said multiple times in his ACX presentations that smooth sound continuity is important. When you edit, you have to do it with Room Tone, not pure silence.
This is one of those looking ahead problems. This has come up before in other threads. “It’s nice you got past all the ACX technical standards, now you have to tell an actual story and make a show.”
I should have brought this up before, but post-production, editing, etc, generally takes five times the length of the show. That’s an average, but it’s scary accurate. If you don’t, the show may sound like it was thrown together on a cellphone by someone in grade school.
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I don’t generally do content, but did you two ever think of throwing the show back and forth between you? I don’t know what the publication rules for that are, but I think that might sound pretty good.
Koz, that’s really good thinking! I will talk with Jerreth about it.
I really wanted to get back over there, today, and set things up again, as I suspect that I simply didn’t set something right. For instance, when I first set up, the recording was truly awful, which was all the more aggravating, as Jerreth was sitting there, expectantly waiting to record. After a number of exclaimations (of disbelief) I finally noticed that Audacity had changed the microphone to a default, instead of the Behringer USB driver. So, I changed that, and it did seem to help. But I suspect that something else had reverted.
But, alas, Jerreth has been glued to her computer since we did that recording. She has new teaching job in the local university and she’s working hard to prepare. Anyway, I need to get the machine from her…
I have an identical laptop with a defective screen, which I can either set up with an external monitor or else change the screen. Then, I could install what she’ll need for recording and simply leave it in place all of the time. Another idea I have, is that I have a tower with Windows 7. It has a couple of fairly minor, yet time consuming problems to fix before we could use it. But if I did, then we could dedicate that machine to production and, perhaps there wouldn’t be as much of an issue with the fan coming on.
Anyway, I’ll have to hit it again tomorrow. Thanks for all your help guys.
I’ve never met a quiet Windows tower. In one of the ACX videos, the presenter describes putting a noisy computer outside the recording environment and run wires.
We are going to work on a set up, in which the computer is actually on the opposite side of the wall from where the recording is being made. That sounds like a great idea Koz.
This evening we spent a good deal of time working on Audacity. There must be a bad connection, an intermittent one at that, in our set up. I could not get the noise level down to anywhere near acceptable. We finally had to stop for now. Next step, I will try changing cables wherever possible.
Okay, I’m back. I took that used Windows 8 laptop (identical to my wife’s) and restored it to factory, updating it over the course of an entire day, while at work, where I have very good high speed Internet. It actually took a couple of days to finish this. Then I set this laptop up, under the desk and ran the cables for an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. I had to re install Audacity 2.1.0 as well as the Behringer driver.
I’m still not quite sure what was the matter with the last test we ran. But that one had lots of noise. This one seems quite. The advantage of this arrangement is that we can leave everything in place, instead of plugging and unplugging each time, as my wife uses her laptop for her job and personal e-mail, etc. So, my hope is that once we get this right, we can leave everything in place and have consistent results.
[quote="kozikowski
I don’t generally do content, but did you two ever think of throwing the show back and forth between you? I don’t know what the publication rules for that are, but I think that might sound pretty good.
Koz[/quote]
Koz, did you mean recording in a conversational style or taking turns with chapters?
Attached is your sample meeting ACX specs (I believe).
What I did:
EQ curve “EQ4George.xml”, attached. This is a bit higher frequency low cut, starts to cut in at 150 Hz and knocks out the 120 Hz hum. It also has a high cut starting at about 6 kHz. I can’t hear any difference in the voice with this but you should listen as well. With your wife’s higher voice cutting out the 120 Hz hum will make the remaining noise more tolerable.
Normalize to -3.2 dB
Compressor: Threshold = -17, noise floor = -45, Ratio = 1.5:1, Attack time = 0.2 sec, decay time = 1.0 sec. Koz may have some suggestions on this but you need some compression to get the overall RMS level up the ACX standard.
Koz, did you mean recording in a conversational style or taking turns with chapters?
“Tell me, Jerreth, what do you think about Noah’s flood?”
I couldn’t listen to that much over ten minutes. I meant hacking up the message into segments and see how they sound when she gets to the end of hers and you just pick it up with no significant break other than a one-beat gap. It may give you a lot of extra work to organize the messages that way, but it might sound pretty good.
If she had St. Paul and you had St. Nobody, you would have time to fly to Ft. Wayne and back while she was reading, so that break clearly wouldn’t work.
And yes I’m clear this is a lot more theater and less inspirational message. That’s why y’all are producing it and not me.
Perfectly correct. That does pass and it sounds OK, but I think I would have pushed just the slightest Noise Reduction in there.
Attached. Use the blank Room Tone lead-in to the clip for Profile and and then apply NR to the whole clip with 6,6,6 settings. The Noise Reduction of the Beast.
It’s not enough to push the background hiss into The Blackness Of Space, but it makes the noise just the slightest less prominent in the performance. Listen to both. Mine is the one with -2 at the end.
But as above, flynwill’s version should make it past the ACX automated tests. Your call.
Just using that as an example. It would be difficult not to turn that into a teacher/student session.
Which you may want. This is why I stay out of production values. The voices I heard in my head have you two sharing the stories, first one and then the other.
Your production ideas maybe different. Consult your local listings, void where prohibited, licensed drivers only.
Koz, thanks for your input. It is appreciated very much. Jerreth says that the author of Grace Plus Nothing would like a single reader. But, in the future, if we do another book, she’d love to try this.
I’m going to work on the raw audio I last did and try to reproduce what you and Will did. Will get back with my results.
Oklahoma is about to become “an island nation,” or, perhaps “a big lake.” The rain has been so plentiful that it is becoming a problem. We have lost many hours of sleep, in the last week, due to heavy storms. One night, we spent half our time sleeping in a closet on account of a tornado warning. It sounded like a train going by, but for hours.
Greetings from … Soaklahoma. The rain continues. I think we’ve had about an inch a day, average, for over a week. We had 6" last night and it has rained for much of the day. Roads are washing out in places.
Anyway, I did some more recording today. I changed two things. First, I noticed that the power supply to the Folio Notepad emits an electrical hum. I moved it as far from the mixer as I could, and, I believe, the hum diminished. At least it did in my headphones. Secondly, we purchased another Behringer unit to see if that might help. Aaron, our IT guy at work, thought that sometimes the USB cable on the Behringer produced static. We received a Behringer UCA222 Friday and I installed it today.
Here is a clip of a raw recording Jerreth did, using this “new” set up. Nothing else changed except the position of the power supply and the Behringer unit.
I used Koz’s instructions, back a few pages, and tried cleaning this recording up.
Here’s the resulting file.
I am really looking forward to your input to see how we’re progressing. Will go paddle around in my inner tube for a while, waiting for a reply.
The “cleaned up” version does indeed seem to meet the ACX standard.
And yes the hum seems to be significantly reduced-- well done you found it.
If you like give my new “ACX Check” plugin a try (attached). You need download the acx-check.ny file and then copy it into Audacity’s plugins folder. On windows machines this is usually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Audacity\Plug-Ins” but your installation may be different. Once the file is installed in the correct location and you re-start Audacity there will be a “ACX Check” option added to the “Analyze” dropdown. Warning this is “alpha” code it might crash audacity or give erroneous answers. acx-check.ny (5.48 KB)
