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Permalink Reply by Nathan Lowell on May 8, 2008 at 6:43pm

I've heard it. It's really obvious when there's a wide disparity in various levels .. a soft speaker and a loud one .. and it tries to make up the difference. You get a kind of halo effect as Levelator increases the soft one (along with the background noise) and then it tapers down in the gap when the loud one shows up.

Lemme know if you can beat that - I'm using the envelope tool to manually adjust and then running a normalize routine.

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Permalink Reply by Evo Terra on May 9, 2008 at 9:52am

I've had luck with a variation of this. My recording space is sub-optimal, and I'm not really interested in improving it. Good thing I'm not recording a book, huh?

Anyhow, my method is to use the envelop tool as Nathan does, but I don't use the normalize routine. I get the audio file as "clean" as I can (no noise reduction, thanks all the same) and then let the Levelator get my volume fixed. Normalized. Maximized. Levelatorized.

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Howe on May 13, 2008 at 8:59pm

Well, I sort of did what you did. I think. I found settings for the gate/expander I liked and used them while recording some test material, THEN ran the result through Levelator. The results were noticeably cleaner. The tricky part was finding a combination of mike gain, threshold for the filter, and the low end of my speaking volume that worked.

Now I really should have something up in the next day or two. This time for sure...

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Howe on May 8, 2008 at 7:04pm

You get a kind of halo effect as Levelator increases the soft one (along with the background noise) and then it tapers down in the gap when the loud one shows up.

Excellent description of it.

I'm fiddling with the settings on the built-in gate/expander filter in M-audio Session (my recording tool, since it came with the USB mike :) ), and it seems to help...it's more or less designed to deal with culling hum, fuzz and such. The trick is to not have it cut out actual content of course...not being an engineer it's trial and error for me. But I'm glad to hear my ears weren't fooling me!

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Permalink Reply by Edward G. Talbot on May 15, 2008 at 3:54pm

My 2 cents:

I was using a USB mike and audacity and ran into some of the same problems (others as well involving noise reduction). Levelatored stuff just never quite sounded right. I got several bits of feedback on it and finally I took J.C. Hutchins' advice and bought a mixer. It arrived on monday and I was able to finally upload my first chapter today.

Levelator still creates the sonic artifact, even though the sound is good now. I "think" that a combination of doing a better job keeping my vocals level during delivery is the main reason, although since levelator is supposed to level this out, that would be a little disappointing. It's not like I have radical differences in levels. Anyway, at this point I am doing exactly what Nathan mentioned - the envelope tool and normalization, although I am still learning how best to make these sound good.

It sounds like you have gotten your recording handled, so congrats!

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Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Howe on May 16, 2008 at 5:25am

Thanks, Ed.

Has anyone tried methods for simulating things like whispering? It does seem that if Levelator is pulling up the lows, it would be difficult to do. Not that I have anything I feel requires a whisper in this first novel, but...or do people rely on the cues, a la "his voice sank to a whisper" to indicate such?

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Permalink Reply by Edward G. Talbot on May 16, 2008 at 8:04am

Interesting question - I don't think have any place in my book where that would really be required. probably the best answer is a "stage whisper" - say it just as loud as normal but in the style of a whisper.

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Permalink Reply by P.G. Holyfield on May 19, 2008 at 6:59pm

Yes, a stage whisper works. As long as it sounds like a whisper, it works. And you wouldn't want to really whisper, as it would make some listeners have to rewind to catch what they couldn't hear :-)

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