2021-07-22 Podcast sound engineering woes

I’ve been editing a new podcast episode and I’m not so happy with the process right now.

Here’s the three effects I apply in Audacity:

• Click Removal (Threshhold 200; Max Spike Width 20)
• Compressor (Threshhold -12dB; Noise Floor -40dB; Ratio 10:1; Attack Time 0.2s; Release Time 1s; Make-up gain)
• Truncate Silence (Level -25dB; Duration 0.3s; Truncate Detected Silence; Truncate to 0.3s)

The problem with click removal is that sometimes sounds like p and t disappear as well. We get “oisoned” instead of “poisoned”, for example. How annoying.

The problem with the compressor is that it looks for the loudest noise and scales according to that. If the click removal missed a little click somewhere, that means that the average loudness will be lower than usual.

Perhaps what I need is to use Amplify to get most of the track to -6dB, and clip it at -3dB, and see where that takes me?

​#Podcast

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All right, new episode, new process! No click removal!

• Amplify, with New Peak Amplitude -5.0 (a bit more than -6.0)
• Truncate Silence (Level -25dB; Duration 0.3s; Truncate Detected Silence; Truncate to 0.3s)

– Alex 2021-07-23 11:03 UTC