Work Stuff

Searching for 'noise reduction tutorial' in Cool Edit Pro's help system, found a Howto for restoring clipped audio:

To restore clipped audio while retaining the amplitude

If you have clipped audio (sound that’s overly amplified to the point of distortion), Cool Edit Pro’s Clip Restoration effect can help clean it up. Here’s how to use it without changing the volume of the waveform.

1. In Edit View, use Edit > Convert Sample Type to convert the file to 32-bit audio.

2. Run Effects > Noise Reduction > Clip Restoration with “Input Attenuation” set to 0dB.

3. Run Effects > Amplitude >Hard Limiting with “Boost Input” set to 0dB, and “Limit Max Amplitude” set to -0.2dB to bring the restored clipped audio back into normal range.

4. Use Edit > Convert Sample Type to convert the waveform back to the original sampling frequency if desired.

As given in a previous post, this is fairly straight-forward when the resulting DVD can fit in a regular DVD5 disc. But when it's bigger, must use DVD Shrink. And DVD Shrink does not play nice with the ifo files created with ifoEdit. Had to
1. Create ifo files separately with ifoEdit for each PGC ripped into it's own folder making sure DVDDecrypter had the File Splitting set to 1 GB in settings. Still didn't work with Shrink.
2. Had to rip one of the parts with DVD Shrink itself, shrinking it in the process
3. In Re-author mode of DVDShrink, drag and drop required ifo files
4. Set Start/End Frames for each title, hit Backup.

From geardiary, Fstream is a free app to listen to streaming audio.

Captured the intro and outro tracks in 3 languages from miniDV tape to DVD. Used NeroVision Express write directly to DVD feature to capture to a rewritable DVD+RW. Could capture multiple takes without having to erase earlier takes - I'm not sure if this is possible with DVD-R, but possibly yes. Then renamed the VOBs as VTS_01_01.VOB, VTS_01_02.VOB and so on and used IFOEdit to create IFO files for quick mastering.

Made by K, here is a tutorial for iPod users for tagging their music files.

Tagging music files for iPod users

Right-clicking on zip files on shared drives now give the message “This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Would you like to continue?” Apparently this is a "feature" MS has added from IE7 onwards. That link, as well as this one and this one, gives workarounds if you do it a lot and are annoyed by the popup.

Wanted to add an update to the audio processing post. Found that the search box in the blogger bar at the top of this blog was not working too well. Google site search - the "search hnsws.blogspot.com" option at the top of the page - was working better. I'm not removing the blogger bar just yet, because some time ago the opposite was true, with site search not returning proper results.

Anyway, here is the update. To the info in the earlier post of 2006, this auto-trim-crop tip has to be added. Also, in Sound Forge version 7 (and above?) the normalization has been tweaked a bit, so that -12 dB is almost as loud as -10 dB in the earlier Sound Forge 4.x. So, in batch processing, the processing settings look like this:



One more point to be mentioned is that when processing audio sent for regional language broadcasts, I have to select the regions with similar levels based on visual inspection and normalize them separately - m on Sound Forge drops a marker at current cursor position, and double-click on a region selects it.



Filenames for these (other language broadcasts) are also in a pattern, this can be easily learnt by looking at the older files.

AOL's Feed Back Loop redacts the aol email id, even redacting the X-Subscriber header. So, we've to dig through the mail server logs to find the subscriber. First we have to find the message id which the mail server reports -

Received: by krishna.radiosai.org (Postfix, from userid 33) id [11 char alphanumeric id]

and use that id for

cat /var/log/mail.log | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]
or
cat /var/log/mail.log.0 | grep [11 char alphanumeric id]