On Fri, 14 Dec 2018 23:10:27 +0000, Will Godfrey wrote: ^ ^opaque Don't care too much about all those angles you should avoid to the walls. For testing purpose listen in another room using headphones, if you should notice an unwanted comb filter effect, just change the up/down angle to the floor. The opaque nylon stocking is only needed for single speakers/singers very close to the microphone, even a few thin layers of a tissue wrapped around the microphone and fixed with an elastic band could do the job. There is only one rule, you need to care about when doing your very first recording of that kind. Test listen in another room using headphones, due to the short blanket syndrome you can't fix what is going wrong in the first place, by using de-essing, filtering hum and other noise. How to place a group of speakers/singers depends on the kind of microphone, since you only own one microphone, you only could do tests by listening via headphones in another room and try to get the best out of this microphone. The only thing you really need is a parametric EQ. Perhaps you need low and high shelving filters and maybe compression, too. It is very unlikely that your microphone is kind of a special microphone, such as one with omnidirectional characteristic, so giving advices how to use such microphones doesn't make sense. Most beginner's microphones are cardioid. Tell the people that they are not allowed to touch the microphone, e.g. not to turn it off and on by a switch that some microphones do have. Often amateur singers/speakers think they help the engineer by e.g. turning the microphone off and on, helping to fix the position etc., but you should be the only one testing different positions of the microphone, to become aware how the quality of the recording does change, when changing the position.

On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 06:31:13 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote: The above usually isn't needed for the recording itself, it's needed for the finishing process. -- pacman -Q linux{,-rt{-securityink,-cornflower,,-pussytoes}}|cut -d\ -f2 4.19.8.arch1-1 4.19.8_rt6-0 4.19.5_rt4-0 4.19.1_rt3-0 4.18.16_rt9-1

On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:14:45 +0100, David Kastrup wrote: That is the best advice of all! It's not a problem, it's the challenge to catch the charm of imperfection.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions! Equipment wise I do have a Rode NT-1A and come to think of it a really cheap (<10 €) dynamic mic too. I do have a stand and a pop screen. I probably can't hang up a duvet or curtain. It will be spoken word and I'll record them separately. It will be around 150 lines, so I'd like to keep editing and post-processing to a minimum. I was thinking of doing just some cutting and then batch processing only. My thought was r128gain to get a consistent volume and maybe apply a compressor or somesuch, sox compand maybe? The quality of the recordings don't need to be top notch, but they need to be intelligible and at least at consistent levels as they'll appear more or less randomly one after another. Best regards, Philipp

Dec 15 2018, hollundertee(a)gmx.net has written: ... Very nice. ... I may be biased here, but how about Ecasound, it can apply LADSPA, LV2 and it's own effects. If you get a fairly consistent recording, you may use a GUI tool to find good settings for a nice EQ (maybe eq10q (or was it eq10k?) or Fons' fil plugin (4-band parametric) and you'd have a choice of compressors/limiters. You could then apply these on the commandline. You may even try the speech denoiser LV2 (sdenoise) in your chain to see if that gets rid of the reverb nicely. Alternatively both LADSPA and LV2 have a dedicated commandline tool to apply plugins to an audiofile. HTH and good luck and much fun! ... Best wishes, Jeanette -- * Website: http://juliencoder.de - for summer is a state of sound * SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/jeanette_c * Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMS4rfGrTwz8W7jhC1Jnv7g * GitHub: https://github.com/jeanette-c * Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeanette_c_s There must be another way Cause I believe in taking chances But who am I to say - What a girl is to do <3 (Britney Spears)

On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 12:41:56 +0100 Fons Adriaensen &lt;fons(a)linuxaudio.org&gt; wrote: Indeed to late for the recordings, but thank you anyway. I'll still have to do all the editing tomorrow morning and there will always be a next time. I made a whole bunch of mistakes along the way, the most stupid one first: I had someone whistle a melody and gave him said melody on my headphones (AKG702). The melody was much too loud and bled into the recording. These phones are probably not idea for recording, but the main issue was definitely the volume. Good thing the whistling wasn't usable anyway as it was rather out of tune and inconsistent. I think having three or so people whistle live would work better, but we decided on a different music track as fallback. I put a blanket in a wrong spot. Well, there was pretty much only one wall where I could fixate a duvet. The room is roughly square, I had the mic rouhly center of one wall in ~2 m distance, facing the opposing corner to the left. There's a large box containing some network hardware or somesuch in that corner. The duvet was on the left side wall. On the right side wall is a front of windows. Turns out some people turned the mic to face the opposing wall rather than the corner without me noticing. I don't know why, I guess they like symmetry or right angles. I think the reverb wasn't too bad though. That worked out well, no issues with outside noise. I probably recorded some people with a too high level, but the speakers were vastly different. From large men with powerful low voices to tiny women with whimsical voices. I didn't adjust my levels a whole lot between those and used whatever metering Ardour has set as default. I did have the limiter of the UA-25 enabled and there were a handful of cases where it was active. That sounds like a very useful tip. A lo of them had their lines on the side but down as well. Funny enough most also read from the paper when it was literally a single word. I thought they didn't touch it but it seems some of them did without m noticing. I didn't apply any effects during recording. Does it matter whether it is done during the recording or in post? Thank you very much. I don't know whether I'm any good with a EQ, but I will try. We cut down on our voicelines but a number of other teams asked whether I could record them, so I ended up doing hardly anything else today. I didn't find a good workflow in ardour, but it somewhat worked. For our own voices recordings I used the playlist feature. Not sure that was a smart thing. Exporting certainly seems easier with separate tracks. So that's what I did for the other teams, record on a track per line. Sometimes a track per take, sometimes just keep recording those multiple takes in a single clip. I then stem-exportet them, because that seemed to be the simplest way to get a wav file per track. The padding at the end is rather unnecessary though. Because I needed to add new tracks I tried to add multiple at once and got silence rather a recording on some of them. That seems like a bug in Ardour. When you add tracks during a session every odd one is non-functional. There may be more conditions to that, but it certainly was annoying having to add twice as many tracks and then remove half of them to get usable ones. So the lack of knowledge on how to properly track and organise using Ardour slowed the recordings down a whole lot. I did a weird dance where I'd mute the already recorded one, disarm it, add a new one, arm it, enable recording and roll. Rinse and repeat a hundred times or so. I also used the crappy dynamic mic to record a couple of weird game sounds as well as cheer and laugh tracks. Not sure that was smart either. I know what you're thinking, but we are making a gameshow game after all. Anyway, I'll spend tomorrow morning with editing and I hope I'll find a good way to deal with the playlist stuff. If someone knows a nice short tutorial on Ardour workflows that would certainly be helpful. Thanks a lot for all your suggestions. Best regards, Philipp

On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 10:08:00PM +0100, hollundertee(a)gmx.net wrote: If you record one voice at a time, the simplest way is to use just a single track. You can cut it up later and distribute the pieces to as many tracks as you like for mixing. Did you check the track input connections ? Probably Ardour's autoconnect feature alternated between the two channels of a stereo sound card. So every second track would get silence unless you change the connection manually. It's a 'feature' :-). Autoconnects are the first thing I disable whenever I install Ardour, it almost always does the wrong thing. You probably need to get to know Ardour a bit more. Even if you accidentally record 'over' an existing track that's no problem, the two recordings are in different regions and you can easily separate them. Ciao, -- FA