Slight distortion -meditation recording

[phoenix]

Hi,
Ive recorded a meditation cd for a client using audacity and a decent headset, which was actually quite effective, the problem being the mic i imagine was too close and on certain words such as ones that start with P, B.. etc have that slight white noise, is there anyway i can minimize this?

[kozikowski]

Sound overload or clipping is one of the Four Horsemen. Pretty deadly. One of the people on the forum was working on a sibilance filter. I wonder how that's coming along. That's not strictly the same thing, but some of the characteristics are the same.

Search the forum(s) or Google Clipping Fixer or Clip Repair or something like that. Somebody was preparing a filter that could mask (not fix) very light clipping damage.

The joke is most people ask for the filter after they bury their show in a sea of distortion. For them there is no hope short of the Reshoot Filter.

You can go in yourself and mute each crashy sound with the Edit > Silence tool. If that produces clicks each time, you may also need Effect > Normalize > Remove DC Level. If doing all that manually would take you weeks, you may not be a good candidate for Click Repair, either.

Another joke is by the time you realize you need the repair tools, it's too late.

If you just had thumping sounds at each P and B, those are easily removed with the equalizer tool. Harsh crashing clicks and ticks indicate serious damage.

Koz

[steve]

and a decent headset, which was actually quite effective, the problem being the mic i imagine was too close and on certain words such as ones that start with P, B.. etc have that slight white noise, is there anyway i can minimize this?

Try and position the microphone to the side of your mouth so as to avoid blowing on it.

[phoenix]

Thank you both for your replies, i'll start looking into the different methods uve mentioned and see how it goes, the problem isnt that bad so if i can minimize it hopefully that should be good enough.

[kozikowski]

<<<Hi, thank you for your time, you mention how the sounds may be easily removed using the eq tool, how would you go about using it in such a way?>>>

Remember I said rumble, thumps and low frequency sounds can be minimized, not what you have.

Are you good with a text editor? I can't tell from the forum which kind of computer you're on. I can email you the coding for this tool:

http://store.shure.com/store/shure/en_U ... .104210700

You have to open up one of the Audacity program files and change it, so this isn't for newbies.


The trick is to eliminate rumble and thumps ahead of the computer with that Shure Brothers tool. If that doesn't work and you didn't overload anything, then you can apply a filter in post production. I may see if I can post this coding on my web site.

Koz

[kozikowski]

OK. Let's see how that goes...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/100Hz_Rumble.txt

I think this only works in Audacity 1.3.

Koz

[steve]

OK. Let's see how that goes...

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/100Hz_Rumble.txt

I think this only works in Audacity 1.3.

Koz

A high pass filter set to 24dB per octave, cut-off frequency = 100Hz will produce a very similar effect.
In Audacity 1.3.6 go to Effects > Filter > High Pass Filter
(the "filter quality" parameter is not relevant as it only applies to the "second order high pass filter")

One thing to note with both the high pass and low pass filters, there has been a misprint in the interface for quite some time and it has only just been corrected in the latest CVS version. All the roll-off values have been written at half of the correct values. The most shallow roll-off should be 6dB per octave (not 3dB per octave) and the steepest roll-off should be 48dB per octave (not 24).

[kozikowski]

And neither one will solve your problem of ticky or crunchy peak sounds.

Koz