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…

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.

Today, we look at a common question.

What is the difference between a DAW and a wave editor?

The products we have looked at so far are generally called audio editors or wave editors. These include Amadeus, Wavelab, Peak, Sound Forge, and Sound Studio.  See the links above.

Highly multitrack.

A Digital Audio Workstation (or DAW) is generally a far more complicated program.  A wave (or audio) editor usually can only handle one or two tracks of recordings, while a DAW might support ten or twenty or more tracks.

Non-destructive editing.

Wave editors are used (usually) to perform what is called destructive editing.

This is a term that is used with regard to a wide variety of media applications, and quite frankly, “non-destructive” editing tends to sound better to the average person.  Apple Aperture is a photo editor and manager that supports non-destructive editing, in that you can apply powerful effects to an image without risk of destroying the original image.

DAWs support non-destructive editing because the goal of a DAW is to support the sophisticated mixing of pre-existing sound tracks, as well as the application of special effects to sound tracks.  But a wave editor is used to make raw recordings and edit them into the sorts of useful tracks that might be imported into a DAW.

Special effects, software instruments, and MIDI.

We’ll look at these things in the next in this series of blog postings relating to audio editing.

But to wrap things up, here is a screenshot of a very popular DAW, Cubase, the same folks who make the WaveLab wave editor we have previously discussed:

Today, we look at a free audio editor, Audacity.  In particular, it has a great noise removal effect.

Cleaning sound in Audacity – a voice track.

First, we create a track and use the red button to record a few seconds of silence, and then a voice.

The denoise effect in Audible.

Now, we swipe the “silence” part of the track, which is really a bunch of background and mic noise.  Then, we select the noise removal effect.

Then we tell the effect plugin to “Get Noise Profile”.

Then, we go back to the track and swipe all of it.  Then, pull down the effect again and choose “OK”.

Now, look at how the effect has removed the noise from the entire track, including the part with the voice recording on it.

The result is a chunk of audio that sounds very professional.

More soon.

As it turns out, the programs listed below can use the cleaning plugins discussed in the previous blog posting – although not all of them can use all of these plugins.

PLEASE NOTE. I could not get the IT Knowledge Exchange WordPress system to put in proper paragraph breaks in the posting below, so I have posted a more readable version on the website I keep for my animation classes: wordsbybuzz.com.  I don’t know why I have so much trouble with the IT KE system; I imagine I am doing something wrong…?

Recording voice.

I teach Introduction to 3D Animation at my university and record my desktop and my voice for each class sessions.  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.)

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…