TAP065: Audacity Compressor Showdown

Excellent episode! So, what we have learned is don’t record noise. I am a live music sound engineer, with some studio recording experience, hoping to become a podcaster.

It seems that many podcasters think of compression as a magic fix for bad recording. It’s not. Compression is a tool to even out the dynamics a little bit of specific sound sources to allow the engineer to increase the level of that sound source without it getting in the way of the rest of the instruments in the mix.

A good example of this would be a loud bass guitar in a loud rock band. Ideally, you would like to have a lot of bass in the mix, really, as much as possible without overpowering the rest of the band. The problem is that bass guitar has a lot of low & low-mid frequencies that can really interfere with the rest of the mix, and the bass guitar can be very quiet at times, and really loud at times. Using compression, an engineer can amplify the quiet notes and quiet down the loud ones (often referred to “squashing”). If done carefully, you can maintain a natural sound and feel, but gain the ability to increase the overall level in the mix.

Now, when you apply this tool to a single spoken word source, where there isn’t a lot of other sound sources to blend it in with, you amplify the quiet and cut the loud parts. If you have a lot of noise in your recording, compression will usually amplify it, and with no other sounds or instruments to blend with, it actually becomes more obvious.

Levelator appears to be doing something to remove background noise, then compressing, and then amplifying.

The bottom line is this, don’t record noise. In all of the recording examples you used here, one of the following three things could have been done during the recording process.

1) Eliminate the machine sounds that come with recording into computers by using a quality USB audio card or recording to an external recorder.

2) Eliminate or reduce as much as possible the background noise during recording. There is no way to mix out traffic noise. If you don’t want it in, don’t record it,

3) Use a decent dynamic microphone. I don’t know how many podcasts I hear where the condenser mic is picking up the fans of a noisy computer, and the typing on a keyboard, not to mention the echo in the room.

Compression is a tool, and can really sweeten or polish your sound, but it shouldn’t be thought of as a way to fix it.

Again, great episode.

Thank you, this promises to be a great episode (haven’t had time to listen it yet, but it’s in my downloaded folder ).