aniroo wrote:
My apologies. I was re reading your notes, after I sent my file, unfortunately, and I forgot that I was going to ask you why I would compress the file to make it louder and then amplify it. Couldn't I just amplify it? I forgot to do either as I meant to ask you about the compression first. Sorry. I will take care of the volume after you explain about the compression, it confused me. BTW. I have a new microphone so my future submissions may not need to fuss with the volume so much.
aniroo
OK, here's the deal. In order to bring the recording into the accepted volume range, you would have to amplify it by about 5 db. However, There are a half dozen or so places that would get clipped if you did that because they are much louder than the rest of the file. So you could (1) go in and manually amplify the parts of the file that lie between these loud places, or (2) manually de-amplify the loud bits so that you could then amplify the whole file, or (3) do the compression trick. Compression does compress the amplitude, but it does it selectively, compressing the loud bits more than the quiet bits. Then, if you have the little box checked that says "make-up gain for 0 db after compressing" the effect will amplify the whole file to push the loudest point to 0 db.
So option 3 is a lot like option 2, except you do it all in one step instead of making lots of finicky adjustments individually.
One downside to compression is that everything ends up getting amplified, including the noise. and if it ends up loud enough then you need to make a noise reduction pass. When I compressed the file I felt like the noise was just a bit too loud so recommended that you do some noise reduction.
Another downside is that compression sometimes introduces some distortion. I didn't find that to be the case here, but it is something to be aware of. Probably the best solution would be option 2 above, but that's a fair bit of work and IMO takes a lot of care to do it without causing the volume to sound odd at the de-amplification points.
