Put All Audio Questions Here

The sendspace link works for me. I'd really like some feedback on it. Being a professional audio editor, I certainly hope my work is up to par...

I'd also like to say that if anyone has any questions or problems concerning waveform audio editing in particular, feel free to ask me, I'm always willing to help. (And always looking for a challenge, too.)

PN: It wasn't actually 'down', it said something like 'this sendspace link is inaccessible for the moment', probably maintenance or something.

And wow, a pro audio editor huh? Makes me jealous

Here's a few questions off the top of my head:
1. What plugins do you use for noise reduction (actual reduction based on samples, not just transforms that use defaults and destroy audio)?
2. What are some good methods to enhance the stereo field of tracks (such as making a stereo file where most things are clustered in the centre pan a bit more or at least have a wider field)?
3. Are there any good reverb effects you know of that don't stop the audio sounding crisp (as in, don't saturate the audio)?
4. Is there a real reason to use 'floats' (32-bit) when applying effects to 16-bit audio, or when copying/pasting into a new waveform?

I'm sure there's more, but that'll do for now

- Spike

Heh. "Professional" as in I earn 100% of my income from audio editing. People tell me that my work is also professional quality, but I'm not sure if I think so. Perhaps that's just my insecurity showing.

There's something I should clarify. I very rarely work on music. Most of my work is done with vocal and spoken tracks, and a lot of my expertise centers on precise manipulation of the waveform to correct speech errors and whatnot. For example, I was working on a radio advertisement recently, and the person who was speaking screwed up and said "cylinder block" instead of "cinder block". I seamlessly edited it to say "cinder block". (You can listen to that here). I also fixed the timing of his speech and removed any unnecessary vocal tract noises. My of my work consists of stuff like this. Basically, I am more of a dialogue editor, rather than an effects editor.

Some of these skills can be used for editing music as well (mixing, splicing, correcting errors, etc) but I'm not involved in making music or in the process of creatively applying special effects.

To answer some of your questions, I don't normally perform noise reduction on the tracks that I work with because our equipment has a very low noise floor. When I absolutely need to reduce the noise level, I use Cool Edit's built-in noise reduction, which samples the noise and has many adjustable parameters.



In the case of your second question, unless you have access to the original multi-track layout, there is no way to selectively move things within the stereo image, although you can expand the width of the whole stereo image. Cool Edit and similar programs have dedicated tools for manipulating the stereo image of a file, including special effects like making a rotating stereo field or doppler effects.



As for questions three and four, I really don't know. I'm afraid they are beyond my range of experience.

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

How about this:

Soothing Defaded

*images*

Hey, that's pretty good. Thanks.

Do anyone know to rip 3do music?

Heh, glad I read this thread! I'm currently doing just that.

I've found it impossible to extract/rip the music, but you can get the sound by using an emulator and simply recording with your sound card ('what u hear' or 'stereo mix' or whatever records digitally for your card).

Since the emulator was messing the sound up, I found a workaround- I started recording, then minimised it and it played fine- might not apply to you though.

Which game you doing, out of interest?

- Spike

Just a simple question.

Is m4a lossy or lossless? I got an iTunes exclusive track that I want to convert to mp3, though if m4a is lossy I probably won't do so and I'll just convert it to WAV or FLAC.

Depends, m4a indicates only an MPEG4-style container. Could contains audio encoded in AAC (lossly) or MPEG-4 ALS (audio lossless coding) material. You should check this with foobar2k, usually it displays the compression type in the preferences. Or try VLC with verbose messages activated, should also give you a clue what type the audio is.

iTunes tracks are all lossy. Unless you just want to remove the DRM, and have a useable m4a file, the only way not to lose quality is to convert to lossless. Probably the easiest (and only) way I know of is to burn it to a CD, and then rip it to FLAC (which is better than WAV; same quality, less size). I think there used to be a program to strip off the DRM, but it's pretty old, and I don't think it's been updated for the new scheme. Hope this helps!

Yeah, this track I'm looking at is lossy. Crap. I guess I'll never get an authentic lossless version of the exclusive iTunes track from The Simpsons Movie.

Originally Posted by Audiophile

iTunes tracks are all lossy. Unless you just want to remove the DRM, and have a useable m4a file, the only way not to lose quality is to convert to lossless. Probably the easiest (and only) way I know of is to burn it to a CD, and then rip it to FLAC (which is better than WAV; same quality, less size). I think there used to be a program to strip off the DRM, but it's pretty old, and I don't think it's been updated for the new scheme. Hope this helps!

I don't exactly know what DRM is, but I usually convert lossy files to WAV with dBpowerAMP, and then recompress to FLAC with EAC.

Thanks, guys~

Originally Posted by Audiophile

iTunes tracks are all lossy. Unless you just want to remove the DRM, and have a useable m4a file, the only way not to lose quality is to convert to lossless. Probably the easiest (and only) way I know of is to burn it to a CD, and then rip it to FLAC (which is better than WAV; same quality, less size). I think there used to be a program to strip off the DRM, but it's pretty old, and I don't think it's been updated for the new scheme. Hope this helps!

Wrong, there are a multitude of projects that can strip the DRM encapsulation of the audio file if you provide a key to do the decryption.
One example is this project:
hymn -- decrypt iTunes and iPod music / unprotect AAC files (m4p --> m4a)

If you know the key and algorithm to the problem then the only problem left is obfuscation.

Whoops! I knew about hymn, I just didn't know that it was working with the newest form of the protection on iTunes. The last time I had checked, it hadn't been updated for a while.

Also, DRM is an acronym for "Digital Rights Managment". It's basically the copy-protection that's on most online music download services. There are some websites that don't have this, but most do.

Originally Posted by Audiophile

Whoops! I knew about hymn, I just didn't know that it was working with the newest form of the protection on iTunes. The last time I had checked, it hadn't been updated for a while.

It was only an example. Like the cracking/reverse engineering community is always lagging behind the copy-protection industry, it's the same here. You just have to wait, or start hacking yourself.

I probably already know the answer to this, but does increasing the latency of a sound card have any possible effect on output quality?

I only use my Audiophile 192 to listen to music, so I bumped up the DMA Buffer to 2048 samples to reduce any likelihood of pops and other artifacts. Sometimes, I get the impression that the music is more forward-sounding and cleaner if I reduce the latency, but it's probably my imagination.

No, it won't affect audio quality. A larger buffer does not modify the digital data that resides inside. Latency is only interesting when dealing with both recording and playback where it matters if you hear the incoming audio data some hundreds of ms later.

I'm using EAC to rip my CDs. I've noticed two of my CDs have the first track title in red, rather than black, indicating a 'track 0'.
(Hybrid - I Choose Noise and Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf)
How do I rip these hidden tracks?

EDIT: Problem solved!
Action> Copy Range
Move the sliders to the appropriate time on the cd, then extract!

How can I make a cue file for individual ape files? Never sussed out how to do it in foobar, nor dbPA.

Treat the ape files like wav or mp3. For example, convert the ape files to wav and write the cue file. Then open the cue file and replace .wav to .ape.

I don't know if this is the right place for this question, but here goes:

Are there any Gameshark codes that mute sound effects in N64 games?