MX Linux Forum

arjaybe wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 11:35 am Big step, manyroads. I noticed that your recording quality improved over the first few 'casts. Good quality control. Tell us more about your equipment and your "studio." What do you use for acoustic dampening?

ffmpeg -i "concat:part1.mp3|part2.mp3|part3.mp3" -acodec copy Episode3.mp3 

sox mono.wav -c 2 stereo.wav 

manyroads wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 12:10 pm

arjaybe wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 11:35 am Big step, manyroads. I noticed that your recording quality improved over the first few 'casts. Good quality control. Tell us more about your equipment and your "studio." What do you use for acoustic dampening?

Thank you @arjaybe. I have moved all my voice editing to audacity and run some simple Tools on the voice. My mic is a Blue Yeti and I have been working at getting it positioned 'correctly'; if there is such a thing. I, also, have my "studio" located in an isolated area (read basement office) which I am able to keep pretty quiet. I record in small blocks of time and use ffmpeg to concatenate voice 'snippets' using cli:

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ffmpeg -i "concat:part1.mp3|part2.mp3|part3.mp3" -acodec copy Episode3.mp3 

. I, also, have played with sox to build parallel stereo tracks to even the sound, so far that seems to work, although, I'm dubious about it, long term.

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sox mono.wav -c 2 stereo.wav 

btw. this seems to work well with mp3 (not just .wav files).

I hope to build and publish a tutorial on what I have learned in a bit.

arjaybe wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 1:09 pm [...]

I record my stories and used to do it in stereo until I was advised that it was an unnecessary complication for the use case. Do you know if stereo is better for recording voice in your case? Maybe the music you play benefits from being 'cast in stereo.

Do you hang blankets or anything to "quiet" the room? I record in a closet, so the clothes do that for me. I also use Audacity for editing. Tip: if you think you might ever compile your 'casts into an audiobook, make sure to set the peaks in Audacity to -3. That's one of the requirements.

sox mono-recording.mp3 -c 2 faux-stereo-recording.mp3

manyroads wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 2:25 pm

arjaybe wrote: ↑Sat Apr 06, 2019 1:09 pm [...]

I record my stories and used to do it in stereo until I was advised that it was an unnecessary complication for the use case. Do you know if stereo is better for recording voice in your case? Maybe the music you play benefits from being 'cast in stereo.

Do you hang blankets or anything to "quiet" the room? I record in a closet, so the clothes do that for me. I also use Audacity for editing. Tip: if you think you might ever compile your 'casts into an audiobook, make sure to set the peaks in Audacity to -3. That's one of the requirements.

I have not tried the baffles. I am going to see if recording in a sound insulated bedroom helps. As for mono recording, I do actually record in stereo. If you have not tried the following sox command, you might see if you like the results. It will make your mono recording, faux-stereo.

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sox mono-recording.mp3 -c 2 faux-stereo-recording.mp3

I have added your tip to my ZimWiki 'memory'.