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Re: Some basic processing questions

Subject: Re: Some basic processing questions
From: "Richard Folwell" richardfolwell
Date: Sat Feb 11, 2012 6:22 am ((PST))
On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 03:34 +0000, hartogj wrote, in response to a
question from Peter Shute:

> > 2. If the above will result in clipping of the loudest parts, what
> >should I do about them? Audacity has a Compress function which looks
> >like it might help bring them down a little without affecting the
> >quieter parts. Is there a better way? (An example of the problem
> >would be where for a few seconds a bird sings just a couple of
> >metres from the microphone.)
>
> I am currently faced with a similar dilemma in one of my recordings. I
> had not considered using a limiter, but maybe I will give that a try.
> My other option was to treat the sections as three discrete tracks and
> save the close-up section as a nice species example.

Another approach I have naively used when faced with this problem will
probably make the professionals here shudder, but here goes:

 - normalize
 - identify the peaks, and bring them down in volume manually by working
with selections
 - repeat until it sounds right (or wrong, in which case back up one
step and stop :-))

Apart from the risk of getting jumps in the sound through choosing the
selections sloppily (which did not seem to happen) I guess that repeated
processing of material in this way (even just for volume) is going to
result in some loss of quality?

Richard









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