Thanks for all the lengthy responses, everyone. I'm still trying to abosrb =
it all, and I'll probably have to come back for more advice once I try a fe=
w things.
So far the plan is to find a few good similar commercial recordings and use=
them to set my PC speakers to a "standard" volume, then mark the volume po=
sition so I can reproduce this any time. I'm surprised I didn't think to ma=
rk the volume control before. I share the PC with the family, so the contro=
l gets fiddled with every day.
Then I'll try setting final recording volumes based on what I think sounds =
right, rather than aiming for some magic level on a waveform display. I'm h=
oping this will lead to the conclusion that I don't need to fiddle with com=
pression or limiting.
Discussion of recording levels has made me realise that I've totally forgot=
ten about the possibility of changing these! I began recording for id only,=
and found that setting PCM-M10 mic level to low/10 seemed to work well, th=
en simply forgot about those controls! I find that I rarely get max levels=
over about -6dB, so perhaps I ought to at least experiment with the high/l=
ow switch to see if it improves the noise levels. (I think someone mentione=
d changing to the high setting won't help, but I should check that for myse=
lf.)
I'm most surprised about people's feeling about fade in technique. I hadn't=
considered the shape of the fade at all, so I must experiment with that.
If I do need to play with compression and limiting, I think I'm going to ha=
ve to investigate thoroughly how it all works. I imagined it would simply m=
ultiply each signal value by some value according to a non linear curve, ju=
st like fiddling with "curves" in Photoshop, etc. Talk of attack times, etc=
, has me thinking it's way more complicated than that. As I said, hopefully=
I won't need to do it.
This isn't a big project at all. I'm simply tidying up my recordings - trim=
ming off the solund of me moving away and returning at the start and end, a=
djusting the levels and maybe playing with noise filtering - so I can share=
them.
Peter Shute
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