Freesound Forums

Well i had this discussion with my wife today about editing. It was more a kind of "i dare you" thing. She's into pictures and images, and she works in a photo shop (no i'm not referring to the adobe software). She's attending this photographer group that she and some other women made, and she was talking about post editing pictures, so they would look just like they wanted them to. You know, heavy editing, getting rid of everything unwanted through software.

It got me thinking, how much do you people here edit your sounds, before posting here on freesound. Is it just cutting the additional recording away, or is it "heavy" editng, like noise removal, equalizing and stuff like that?

Just curious

Well for starters, mostly i just cut the additional sound away and leave it at that. But every now and then, when wind or other dirty noises get in my way, i try to noise reduce and so on. That's about it for me. What about you?

For me, it depends on the sample. With field recordings, I usually only normalize, but sometimes not even that if the noise floor is too high. If it's an electronic sample, I always make sure that the waveform of the sample starts and ends on the zero dB baseline, as well as normalizing. Additionally, with an electronic sample, I often run the sample through EQ to remove frequencies below 20Hz (this I do before the waveform editing and normalization).

I might use a noise gate if it were something like a ringing phone or other intermittent sound. Might well cut off unnecessary low end to reduce the noise floor. If it were an ambience, of course I'd cut out unwanted portions - aircraft overhead, audible snatches of conversation, particularly if they contained brand names, cars passing if they were inappropriate, particularly if they were playing music etc.

I've been wondering about this actually. With sounds that have large dynamic ranges, trains passing etc, would you use any compression?