Workflow Question - Concert Recording - What do you suggest?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hello everyone. On a recent trip to Ireland, I recorded a number of performances by a band we were traveling with with a Tascam DR-05 field recorder. Each show was recorded in WAV form, 24-bit using the built in speakers. For what it is, the Tascam gave pretty good results. Good enough to provide a unique souvenir to our group of travelers. And that is my goal.

So now I have 5 shows that are anywhere from an hour to two in length that I need to clean up and split into tracks with my final goal of converting them into .mp3 tracks to share with the rest of our group of travelers, and the band.

My question to you is this. What would be the preferred method for handling this task. Should I perform all of my filtering to the one, long track first, then split the tracks into individual songs, or should the tracks be split first and then perform the edits? The editing that I’ll be doing will be in line with my Audacity skill level, which is a novice. Some of the shows were a bit bass heavy, so I’ll be trying to figure out how to remove a bit of that as well as checking for clicks and pops. Nothing too grand as my experience in this field and Audacity is very limited.

Thank you all very much for your thoughts. Thank you as well if you have any other suggestions or “must do’s” for cleaning up the tracks.

Jackie
Audacity 2.0.5

2

If you have recognizable music now, then it should be simple filters and cutting to get to your MP3s. You should make very high quality, finished WAVs first, and then burn the MP3s from that. You can’t cleanly edit an MP3, so if your masters are MP3, all you can do is listen, no further production.

Audacity will not export an MP3 without adding the Lame software package.

What are you listening on? Good quality speakers or headphones? You can’t do production on your laptop speakers or earbuds. Or you can, but you can get surprises.

“What is that thumpy noise in the music?”
“What noise? I don’t hear anything.”

While it’s dangerous to apply corrections to a whole night, you might get away with that if nobody changed anything during the entire performance. If the audience changed significantly over the night, then the room and sound will change. You might also get away with that if you need gentle, graceful corrections and not anything serious. Do something and check several times down the show to make sure everything tracks.

If that fails, then you may need to do corrections in segments or sets. “The audience filled up for the third set and the band sound crispness and clarity went right into the toilet.”

At one time we talked about an effect that was simple tone controls. I have to look that one up.

You can drag-select each song in turn and File > Export Selection, or you can label the whole night and let Audacity do it.

Put a label (Control-B) or (Tracks > Add Label) at the beginning of each song you want to export as a simple sound file. Then File > Export Multiple.

There is a trick to that. If you have large portions of the night taken up by the band searching for their mandolin pick behind the amplifier, label that as a single song and just ignore it after the export. The valuable playlist will go right from Song One to Song Three, Song Two being the drummer cleaning up his spilled beer.

Tascams work pretty well. You are warned that there is no magic conversion from ‘Sitting In The Audience With A Recorder’ to Columbia Music Studios. We can’t split instruments from each other and we can’t get rid of the bar maid asking for your drink order.

Koz

3

Here it is.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/really-simple-tone-control-plug-in/12322/1

It may not work if you have hours and hours of work. You my need to split the show up into smaller segments.

Koz