Audacity Forum

Hello,
I work on sundays with an NGO for poor children in India. One of our major contributor is turning 75 later this month. Since, the man in his position has every materialistic things he needs, we have come up with an idea of presenting him with a audio CD of 1950 era songs which he immensely likes. I have attached the link to one of the song, about 310 KB in size.

Problem is that the music is bit louder and the vocal get suppressed.
I need to make the vocal more prominent than the background music. Can you help?

I have read various tips / tutorials here on the forum as well as on wiki. I have tried changing the pitch, amplify, sliding time scale, equaliser and even low / high pass filter. Excuse my ignorance if i should have not tried some thing in particular.

http://www.4shared.com/audio/yA0BwEIG/1 ... ivada.html

Many thanks if you could suggest something.. i have about 60 odd songs and 10 days in hand..

not usually feasible

lots of cds with 50s songs already done right
why not just buy him a cd that is already correct ?

You can't generally take a mixed music selection apart into instruments, voice being one. Everybody gazes longingly at the Vocal Removal tools, but they fail many more times than they succeed. If the music is old enough, it's in mono and there are no tools for that.

I suspect if he already speaks, Hindi, is it? He won't be all that bothered with the quality of the voice anyway. In America, we have contests where friends guess what that some rock group's words actually were because nobody can understand them.

Koz

The sample rate of 16000Hz is too low for music, and from the copious digital artifacts (computery noises) the bit-rate is also way too low ...
only 16Kbps ! .

If you re-recorded the vinyl record using a sample rate of 44100Hz (rather than 16000Hz) there would be more high-frequency content and consequently speech (and singing) would be more comprehensible to an elderly person ... http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 842#p92842

I'd suggest the mp3 bit-rate for a mono recording of 44100Hz should be 128Kbps, (minimum 64Kbps), then you won't get the computery noises.

I don't remember seeing the word "vinyl" anywhere. Did I miss a clue?

Koz

kozikowski wrote:I don't remember seeing the word "vinyl" anywhere. Did I miss a clue?

From “1950” I assumed the source was vinyl.

Trebor wrote:

kozikowski wrote:I don't remember seeing the word "vinyl" anywhere. Did I miss a clue?

From “1950” I assumed the source was vinyl.

Possibly shellac 78s

maybe wax cylinders ?

Vinyl was first tried out as a 78 rpm material in 1939, as a cigarette radio commercial mailed to stations, as vinyl was less breakable in the mail. On the record, mention is made of the Lucky Strike exhibit at the 1939 NY World's Fair. Decca introduced vinyl "Deccalite" 78s after the Second World War. During the war, the US Armed Forces produced thousands of V-Discs for the soldiers to play overseas, as well as giant 16-inch War Department radio transcriptions, all of which were made of vinyl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone ... _materials

If you don't have the record you may be able to download high quality versions of these 50s tunes,
(if they are free downloads they may be illegal and/or come with malware).

Anything that old would certainly have been in mono, thus killing most of the tools likely to help. But, yes, certainly if you're capturing the work yourself, do it in a very much higher quality. Music CD format 44100, 16-bit, Stereo at minimum (even if you don't need the stereo part).

Koz