Audacity Forum

I meant to do this earlier.

Prepare a show normally plus leave a count of three or four "room tone" at the beginning. This is you staring blankly at the microphone and making no noise at all. You can do this at either end of the performance, but you will forget to do it at the end.

Past maybe a gentle volume change, I expect #1 is the only audible step if the show is recorded in studio conditions. The test protocol should only take a couple of minutes if that — if you pass. If the show falls off the rails anywhere in the process, then we enter rescue mode which could take days.

The steps depend on each other.


1. Apply Steve's High Pass filter.
--- low pitched sounds can be almost inaudible and take up a lot of blue wave room. Get rid of those immediately. I don't agree with the 130Hz High Pass filter idea. That would have the exact opposite affect of those commercials to increase your manhood.

2. Normalize to 0.
--- An interim step. We assume any DC vanished in #1.

3. Run the RMS inspector.
--- Hopefully, you pass RMS with 3dB to spare and can Effect > Amplify to -3 and go straight to #4.
--- Assume RMS came out OK, but not great, so you have to leave it there. Then apply gentle peak limiting, the show peaks not to exceed -3.

4. Run inspector for noise level.
--- Everyone is going to fail this one and I'm not sure where to go from here. This could point to the four volume set "How to reduce noise." This will almost certainly point off-page.

5. Cut off any beginning and ending pops caused by #1 and the room tone silent segment.

6. Listen to the work and if it still sounds like you reading your story, Export a WAV for your own show archive and then export a submission for publication approval.

Koz

Also: It would be nice if you could record a single impulse e.g. by clapping, hitting some hard material (like two stone bars) or something similar.
This can be used to either analyse, attenuate or boost the room reverberation.

How about two #2 wooden pencils? It shouldn't be too difficult to round up two of those and their impulse is not likely to overload the microphone.

"We need to be careful not to get Mars and Venus mad at us or they'll stop sending us candy bars and pencils."
- Glendora — Afternoon Kids TV show -

This can be used to either analyse, attenuate or boost the room reverberation.

I'm wondering where you're going with this since the room of a newbie is going to echo and we can't get rid of echoes in software.

Also, can we agree that echoes are a sound quality issue between the performer and ACX? I point to bgravato trying to record his guitar with a single microphone over weeks and this very thread threatening to overtake Bruno's 18 forum chapter record. We passed technical standards full steam a while back and now we're working on sound quality issues.

Who's going to write the Pencil Tick Analysis Tool?

Koz

kozikowski wrote:How about two #2 wooden pencils? It shouldn't be too difficult to round up two of those and their impulse is not likely to overload the microphone.

"We need to be careful not to get Mars and Venus mad at us or they'll stop sending us candy bars and pencils."
- Glendora — Afternoon Kids TV show -

Anything that produces an as narrow as possible impulse, some use even a pistol or a balloon.

kozikowski wrote:

This can be used to either analyse, attenuate or boost the room reverberation.

I'm wondering where you're going with this since the room of a newbie is going to echo and we can't get rid of echoes in software.

Says who? It is done all the time in mobile devices. However, in communication systems, it is blind deconvolution whereas we would have the impulse response of the room.
I actually do not want to remove the echoes though, rather the coloration superimposed by the reverberation.

kozikowski wrote:Also, can we agree that echoes are a sound quality issue between the performer and ACX? I point to bgravato trying to record his guitar with a single microphone over weeks and this very thread threatening to overtake Bruno's 18 forum chapter record. We passed technical standards full steam a while back and now we're working on sound quality issues.

Who's going to write the Pencil Tick Analysis Tool?

Koz

Do you dare to make a guess in the wild?
We have already the plot spectrum analysis tool. Steve has even written a plug-in that converts the exported data to an importable EQ-preset. That's all about sound quality imo, since it will give the voice more presence and clarity in the best case.

That's all about sound quality imo, since it will give the voice more presence and clarity in the best case.

Yes, but divorced from ACX sound file standards.
Maybe after you achieve ACX compliance, then a second pass for theatrical quality. I did build that into the last step.

Anything that produces an as narrow as possible impulse, some use even a pistol or a balloon.

Both of which would overload the microphone, sound channel or both. The test result would be a combination of room characteristics and damaged microphone the latter not part of the actual performance and invalid.

Koz

A popping balloon might destroy a ribbon microphone notoriously sensitive to sudden massive air movements. Koz

The impulse source hasn't to be in front of the microphone, for this purpose finger-snipping or the two pencils are enough.
Louder claps should raher be made where the microphone catches least direct sound, i.e. behind it. Balloons and such things are better suited for large rooms such as a concert hall.

There are other possibilities if you use a mobile player. Such as white noise, noise in one third/octave steps or following the bark scale, chirp tones, or an digital impulse train. They have the advantage that they can exactly be subtracted from the recording and that they originate at the mouth position.
The disadvantage is that characteristics of the player itself are transferred as well.

Greetings all,

I hope you are all well and for those in California, surviving this sweltering heatwave.

Thanks to birthday presents I received an extra box of the Auralex tiles and the Auralex Mudguard. I was able to finish the back wall with tiles, put some on the door and even some on the bottom of the shelf which is above my microphone. The whole room has tiles now. I'll take some pictures tomorrow.

The Mudguard arrived today. I was out for most of it showing my visitor around and so just completed the tests which were requested of silence, speaking, clapping and pencil tapping.

Unfortunately, the Mudguard did not perform the wonder I had hoped. The buzzing noise persists. Also, when I resorted to taking the laptop out into the hall and moving it as far from the audio closet as possible, despite the microphone being in the same place and the volume on Audacity still set the same, I can barely be heard in the recording AND the buzzing is still present. I tried without the USB extension (the original just about reaches) but no difference.

Ugh, this is frustrating.

My visitor taught me about something called Chokes which were used before HDMI came along. Does anybody know if they would silence a USB cable so we could rule that out?

Anyway, for what it is worth, the tests are here on my OneDrive:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=F ... der%2c.wav

Thank you.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, my insomnia has a strong hold on me tonight. Tis now 04:14 and I just had a lightbulb moment, something I ought to have thought of much sooner. I dug out the microphone attachment for my old gaming headset and recorded the room with that. I've added it as file 5.

I don't hear the buzz.

This must surely mean it is the USB cable or my Blue microphone itself, right?

It's not uncommon for USB leads to have ferrite chokes in-line:


Looking / listening to your recordings, even on the quietest one the peak level of the clap is trying to punch its way well over 0 dB. This is one of the inherent problems of USB microphones, they need to be able to handle quite high signal levels because some users will be recording loud things, but that means for low level spoken word recordings, the level is rather a lot lower than desirable, so the noise floor is relatively higher. If you were singing loudly a couple of inches away from the mic, then relatively, the noise level would be almost insignificant.

Thank you, Steve. I'll see if I can find an inexpensive one.

What did you think of the recording with my headset microphone?

Cheers.

Edit: This will arrive on Friday. I really hope this sorts it out and is the last money I have to spend.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003MQ ... UTF8&psc=1


Cheers.