Editing Sound.

We’re in a series of postings relating to editing sound.

Previously.

See the previous postings on  cleaning audio, selecting an audio editor, and a couple of basic audio editing principles.  We have also looked at the interface to a popular audio editor, Amadeus Pro, and at basic editing in Amadeus Pro. We looked at a free audio editor, Audacity, and how one of its effects can be used to remove noise.  Most recently, we looked at the way that VST and AU plugins add power to sound editors, and then at the difference between audio editors and digital audio workstations.

Sound formats.

Today, we look at a few popular audio formats and compare them.

Uncompressed.

If you want your sound to be as close as possible to the original sound captured in the real world, wav and aiff are two very popular choices. The problem is that these uncompressed sound formats can lead to very large files.

But wav and aiff are important for capturing sound in a “lossless” way, meaning that the digital media contains all the information that is captured by the recording equipment. They serve as very good archival formats for permanent recordings that might later be edited and used in a variety of other formats.

By the way, wav, which is short for Waveform Audio Format, is a Microsoft standard. And aiff stands for Audio Interchange File Format and it was developed by Apple.

Compressed.

Perhaps the most popular compressed sound format is mp3. It is used heavily on the Internet. It is a proprietary format owned by the Motion Picture Experts Group, and its full name is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is highly compressed in that an audio recording in wav format might be reduced by 80 or 90% when converted to mp3.

This sort of transformation is called “lossy”, in that information is removed during the conversion process. But what is removed is for the most part not missed by the human ear. The idea is to remove frequencies not heard by people and to remove soft sounds that are drowned out by other, louder sounds.

The end result is good enough for high quality music.

A competitor of mp3 is wma, which stands for Windows Media Audio, and is also proprietary. And yes, Apple promotes mp3.

More later…

Recording voice for web postings.

I teach Introduction to 3D Animation at my university and record my desktop and my voice for each class session.  I post them so students can review them later.  (See wordsbybuzz.com and 3dbybuzz.com.) I also write fiction on the side and like to read and record my stories.  (See lheureux.co and buzzlheureux.com.)

The problem of cleaning audio.

In both cases, I find myself trying to clean audio.  Since I’m far from an audio expert, I’ve searched around for easy to use plugins that do a good job of removing noise without giving my voice a hollow sound – and without me having to futz around with the settings forever and manipulate audio parameters I don’t understand.

Three great products.

Here are three great out-of-the-box audio cleaning plugins that work with such applications as Bias’s Peak, Steinberg’s Wavelab (my favorite), Amadeus Pro (see the Apple App store), and Sound Studio Pro (see the Apple App store).  (Please note that I use Macs and that not all of these plugins work with all of these applications.)

Bias Soundsoap.

See the Bias site for details on Soundsoap.  It comes in multiple versions, from very cheap to not so cheap.  It comes with a lot of different audio editors, and even their very cheap “SE” product works great.  Bias’s Peak Express, by the way, is a great deal in a professional quality audio editor.

Sonnox DeNoiser.

See Sonnox for details on their DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive, but comes with Wavelab Elements, a very good deal in a high end wave editor.

Izotope RX 2 DeNoiser.

See Izotope for details on RX DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive.

More on this next time…