Audacity Forum

Dear Ones,
I'm relatively new to Audacity - a wonderful offering and service, I'm so glad to have found it - and I'm a novice recorder and audio editor. From what I've read and what I understand of Audacity and of mastering, I understand that Audacity does not do mastering. It seems we can get the tracks as close to the final step -- with Compression and such -- but not do the mastering, that is, to bring the sound to forefront. Is that correct? What mastering program works well with Audacity?
Thank you.

I know of no reasons you can't "Master" in Audacity, given you have no unrecoverable damage (see: Coughing).

<<<with Compression and such>>>
<<<to bring the sound to forefront.>>>

There is no Bring Sound Forward. If you didn't shoot it properly, there are very few tools that can change the dynamic presentation without them sounding like you are trying really hard to change the dynamic presentation. Dynamic volume compression is to be avoided for roughly the same reasons. It's really easy to make a show sound like a bad radio station. Particularly if you have a show with high background noise, a lot of sound management tools will be denied to you--wherever they come from.

Do you know what "pumping" is? That's a badly adjusted compressor that makes the natural room noise vanish every time the performer speaks. It's really annoying.

If you want to mess with quality and presentation tools, you're in the wrong Audacity. Even though it says "Unstable" and "Beyond here dragons dwell" (OK, it really doesn't say that last one) Audacity 1.3 has vastly better and more comprehensive production tools. The noise reduction, equalization, and compression tools are much better in 1.3.


Also, be really clear that Audacity does not save sound files. Audacity saves Editorial Production Environments (Projects), and no, you can't email one of those to your mum. Export As WAV at every opportunity. Those are stable, stand-alone sound files and you can copy them to a backup drive for safety in the event that your production machine crashes.

You should be able to have your production machine vanish and still be able to continue with the show from the backup portable drive you keep with all the capture master copies in the garage and the computer you borrowed from your sister in the next village.

There was a voice performer who posted here once and she caught the imagination of the forum. She was reciting Celtic folk stories at home and we designed some custom filters for her.

Koz