Freesound Forums

Hi lovely people.
When out on the field recording an interview directly onto my R-09 I don't use a mixer. What tweets and fixes would you guys use in audacity to improve the vocal quality for use in a podcasts etc?
Thanks.

If one person is louder, this level-speech plugin for Audacity may be of use ...
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?p=238355
That level-speech plugin is like Levelator ... https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelator

If you notice the noise floor in your recordings when you mix them with the other podcast material, you may use Audacity's Noise Reduction function.
You'll need a few seconds of recorded "silence" which will contain the noise you want to reduce, and you'll select it and assign it to the noise profile, then you can select the whole track and run the reduction. Whenever needed, you may want to use it before the level-speech.
Experiment with the settings and you'll find how much you can reduce the noise without affecting the remaining signal too much.

HTH

Sorry in advance, as this isn't really an answer, just some side thoughts.

First, it's best to use a boom mic or a shotgun mic, and or *very* close mic (even if omni) to maximize the SNR to start with. The results from doing this will far exceed the result of having to use noise reduction in post (and not take nearly as much time).

But I'm thinking about how a Marantz I used to use at a radio station would record 2 channels from one mono source. One was at "full" gain, and the other was -20dB from that. This would allow you to recover usable audio from the -20dB channel (most likely) whenever sound levels accidentally exceeded the headroom on the normal channel. I assume this is standard practice for ENG. But in post I've never really had to deal with smoothly recovering usable audio from such a recording where the normal channel becomes unusable. It seems to me that there ought to be a relatively simply procedure would one follow that could be scripted, or even built into the editor itself, to do this. I'm sure I could work it out, but perhaps there are some tips or scripts that folks have already shared or could share here that might be of some value toward that end?

--
Keith W. Blackwell (zimbot)