AUDACITY SPECTROGRAM FULL
You also get the full spectrogram feature for this price which is worth it alone. Lastly, I use a fade tool to gently increase/decrease the volume over 15 to 30 seconds depending on the length of the recording.Īll three of these tools are included in the Elements version of Izotope RX 7 for $129. I then use a gain tool to bring up the volume of the loudest peak to -2 dB. If you don’t have a de-hum tool, an equalizer with a low-cut filter will work just as well. To fix this, I use a de-hum tool as a low frequency filter. They usually record tracks with a lot of rumbling that wasn’t audible in person. Most microphones are more sensitive to lower frequencies than our ears are. With this simplified approach to my audio, the only tools I use now are de-hum, gain and fade. Trying to salvage a long recording by masking noise interruptions is not worth your time. If there is a noise you don’t like in your recording, either embrace it or cut it out entirely. Save yourself from these mistakes and keep your processing effects and tools to a minimum. Every time I used processing tools for noise removal, my ears knew something was wrong. They never completely removed the problem and made new problems entirely. I believed the hype and wasted a lot of time and money on such tools. De-wind, de-click, de-hum and other noise repair tools are advertised as essentials. If you’re new to field recording, you’ve probably heard about all kinds of fancy editing tools. Because I don’t waste time listening to polluted audio, this saves me a ton of processing time. After working with a recording for one minute, I can tell what the natural soundscape looks like and where the noise pollution is.Īfter deleting the sections of noise, I’m left with smaller chunks of audio. The louder the recorded sound, the brighter it will be in the spectrogram.Īt a glance, you will be able to tell where the most interesting sections of audio are, and where any noise pollution may be. Frequency is on the y-axis and time is on the x-axis. Spectrograms display audio as a color-coded graph.
AUDACITY SPECTROGRAM HOW TO
See the below article for more detailed information on how to record the best-quality audio in the field. Take the time to get to know your environment and nature will reveal the best spot for your microphones. What most people don’t realize is that behind most “good” recordings is a talented artist who meticulously chose that location and direction to record in based on observations or experience. Composition: some field recordings are simply more interesting than others. To bring the volume back up, digital gain is needed but this also raises the noise floor, lowering your sound quality.ģ. Large changes to balance will greatly decrease the volume of your sound. Slight changes can be made in post by adjusting the panning dial but you will have limited success trying to fix a very unbalanced recording. I slowly zero-in where the environment sounds the best (balanced) and start recording. I close my eyes and move my mics up and down, and then left to right. I use headphones in the field to find the best balance. Correctly balancing your left and right channel audio in the field preserves the natural acoustics and limits the amount of post-production gain. Balance: balance refers to how a stereo recording sounds.
This gives you headroom for “surprises” when things get closer or louder than you anticipated.Ģ. Over time, you will learn what gain gives you the best result in any given situation.Ī general rule of thumb is to set your gain so that your main subject sits at -12 dB. Quiet sounds are still audible and your main subject stays below 0 dB (no clipping). Gain: properly set gains will give you the largest dynamic range of sound. I don’t know if the “perfect” recording exists, but there are factors you can control that will increase raw recording quality.ġ. Not only will this save you time, it will also result in better quality audio. Whether you’re recording audio, video or photographs, nailing your recording in the field is important. This can be said for any recording device. I would like to share this streamlined process with you so that you can spend more time in the field and less time editing. I knew that I needed to simplify my processing techniques so that I could edit my recordings faster. Well, tomorrow never came and I lost a lot of recordings to a hard drive failure. I would frequently edit one recording, call it a day, and put the remaining raw recordings on the back burner for tomorrow. Having this much audio to process can be overwhelming and certainly was for me when I first started this hobby.Įditing my audio was such a daunting task. Usually, I’m dealing with 3-5 hours of audio from a day trip and 12+ hours for an overnight. When I come home from field recording, I often have 5-10 tracks to edit.
0 kommentar(er)
