So I dropped it to mono, 96kb at 44.1kHz and it cut about 18 megs. I went from 48 megs to 32 megs. Great stuff guys and I can’t tell a difference. Thanks!
– IG
So I dropped it to mono, 96kb at 44.1kHz and it cut about 18 megs. I went from 48 megs to 32 megs. Great stuff guys and I can’t tell a difference. Thanks!
– IG
Great! Let us know if you have any other questions. Good luck!
Well the main thing left is for future episodes and that is getting a better recording of myself. The mic I have, I assume should stand vertically in front of me and I speak into one of the grills. How far from it should I keep my face?
I need to get a wind screen as I am popping Ps and stuff. I know I can make a cheap one out of a stocking and a wire hanger or something else to give it shape.
Any other tips on the setup?
– IG
Do you have the facility to listen to headphones while you speak in the mic? If so, read something and move around the grille until you hear your voice centered directly on the diaphragm. Then back up six inches. Pop filters are not too expensive, but until you get one, you can use a (clean!) cotton sock over the grille. People have improvised a pop/spit filter with a section of nylon stocking, doubled, but a sock works, too.
As for setup, what other equipment are you using? Are you going directly into the sound card with the mic, or do you have a mixer?
Another tip for making smaller files is to record all your stuff for the podcast in 44.1 mono (one channel), and do all your editing in mono, then convert to mp3 at 96 mono. One track is less confusing to look at than two, and it’s perfectly suited to your purpose.
…Or you could work in 22,050 Hz mono. We did here at the radio station for years, until the other stations told us they wouldn’t accept any more of our stuff until we sent it in 44.1. For voice work, that will be converted to low bitrate mp3, 22.05 is just fine, and that will cut the size of your .wav file in half, as well. You should not be able to discern any difference in the quality of the product.
Heh. I’ve used the sock-as-pop-filter method. (My wife does’t wear hose so the nylon option wasn’t available) Another musician friend of mine used the nylon method around a twisted bit of coat hanger attached to his mic stand before he bought a proper pop filter.
I did the same thing when I recorded some songs with a band I was in.
If possible hang an old thick blanket in the corner and stand in front of it. It reduces the incidence of room reflections. If you don’t use the blanket, do not stand in the corner. Standing, BTW, is recording advice for singers. It is not necessary for speech. Sit or stand; do whatever makes you most comfortable.
The mic is cardioid so you should not speak into either of the grills, you should speak into one only - the grill that the capsule is facing. Generally this is on the same side as the company’s emblem.
You can cut down on plosives by using a high pass filter at about 200hz. Many mic and mic preamps have this built-in, you just have to switch it on.
I use a CyberAcoustics headset (mike and earphones in one). Sure, I look like an old-time telephone operator, but the mike has a small foam pop filter (maybe I look more like Britney Spears?) that takes care of popping Ps and that sort of thing.
And it all it plugs into the USB port of my computer. Seems to provide a much cleaner sound; to my ears anyway.
I find that the foam on those things is a little too porous and thin to be more than moderately effective in eliminating plosives. The upshots though are that it sits close enough to the mouth and is sensitive enough that your voice will be much louder than the acoustic reflections, and that you can usually adjust that mic to sit below the mouth so that it still picks up well but is out of the line of plosive fire.
I thought I’d come back to the thread to address some other points I missed while I was at work - editing audio.
Omi no Kami, Audition has a check box for Adjust for DC on Record built into the sound card settings, and under Amplify, it has a preset that has to be used every time called Center Wave. If you select that and hit OK, with or without amplifying the wave, it will correct offset. As for removing the sound of environmental noise, you’re pretty much out of luck. FFT noise reduction is good for hiss, very low level hum, and clicks & pops. It does not remove buzz, or high-level background noise, leaving only speech. Hum is best removed with a -30 dB notch filter at 60 and 120 Hz.
I occasionally get a reporter come to me and ask if I can get rid of the sound of a boat motor, or planes flying overhead, or hundreds of people in the rotunda, or rain. I have to demur, and recommend they call the forensics lab at the FBI. Those guys can isolate the sound of a drug deal conversation taken with a parabolic mic from a block away, filtering out traffic and other noises. They aren’t using Audition to do it.
Mindfield, I honestly don’t know if Audition’s NR is parametric. Like so many other things, I know how to make it do what I want it to do, but I don’t really know how it does it, or why. RE: EQ - I work in uncolored sound, and never use equalization for anything. I bought a $200 cartridge and stylus for their famous, flat response and I don’t mess with it. I want the results to be what the engineer wanted the record to sound like, not what I thought sounded brilliant coming out of my speakers.
I participated in a thread a couple of years ago, wherein I taught another poster how to remaster records the same way I do, using only text to describe the process. If you’d like to read it, please go here. That’ll save us rehashing it in this thread, although I’d be happy to answer any questions it raises.
I’ll get some before / after samples together for you and send them in the next couple of days, OK?
[Quick Hijack kinda]
I thought I would add this hear because I don’t want to start my own thread since there is already an audio recording/editing thread.
I have played music in a studio many times, but I do not have the money for a studio myself. I would like to get a 4-track and such, just to record a little on my own and make simple things. I am a solo singer/songwriter and would probably layer a djembe track in as well - enough backstory. What should I use to record with?
My first thought was to get a Tascam analog 4-track, basically for value of price. Digital is nice, but I am poor(ish). Any other recommendations for analog mixer/recorders?
[/Quick Hijack]
Brendon
I find I sometimes have to guess at what the engineer wanted it to sound like. I tend to go by the assumption that, were it a recording done today, they’d want it to have a good dynamic range without going overboard on the highs or lows. In the case of the remastering I did most recently in the last few days, they were pretty poor recordings – an amateur band years before they hit it big, so pretty sketchy equipment all around. I went for some subtle boosts to the bass and highs to bring out a fuller, more rich sound because I figured – hey, if they had the equipment, this is probably more like what they’d wanted to have produce.
Or at least, what I’d have wanted to produce.
You know, I was hoping you’d offer up something like this – and now I see you’ve already done so. Excellent! I’ll have to really give that a read, thanks!
This too would be great, thanks. My E-Mail’s current in my profile, though if you’d prefer to post them somewhere then that works just as well.
Brendon, you can download Audacity for free. It’s a multitrack recorder. It’d be a small learning curve to sort it out, but then it would do virtually anything you wanted to do. The only thing you’d have to buy is a way to get an XLR mic and an instrument into your sound card.
For that purpose here at home, I have a Rolls GCI-401 Audio-Computer Interface. It fits in a spare drive bay. It has one XLR mic with switchable phantom power, its own volume pot, an instrument 1/4" plug with volume and a balance knob to mix the output with the mic, and a line input and phono input and preamp, with volume control. It’s got an 1/8" input on the front for a CD player or iPod. The outputs are direct to sound card, or RCA outputs, or 1/8" output. It was $98. Forget tape, you can have digital for real cheap now. Hope that helps.
Well see, therein lies the rub. I’m actually looking at glottalized resonants and clicks, so significant parts of the signal persist all the way up to the low 40khz range.
I’m slightly familiar with Audacity. I used it on my old laptop a good bit, but still need to get it on this new one. I think I may have to look into something like what you have, I just kept seeing digital workstations and the cheapest were $100 more than any analog tape so I assumed that is what I could afford…
Thanks Fishbicycle
Brendon
This is a nitpick, but you made this mistake a few times: 40kHz is well, well out of the human hearing range and also out of what can be recorded at 44.1 kHz sampling rate. I think you’re confusing the sampling rate (how many times per second voltage is measured by the analog to digital converter) with the actual highest frequency that can be recorded (the Nyquist frequency). Theoretically, this is half the sampling rate. Of course, if you are recording at 96kHz, then, yes, there will be information in the 40kHz range, but it is not audible to humans, and regular speakers will not be able to reproduce it.
While I can hear up to 18kHz, this is rather high. Most adults probably cannot hear above 15 or 16kHz.