Kathi,
That does it!
Section 14 - "Uncle Wiggily and the Watermelon" -
PL OK
Thanks for the chapter.
kgrreader wrote:
PS My recording area is a work in progress. I'd love to know if you have any suggestions on getting rid of background noise in my recordings.
First off,
don't worry too much about it. At a normal listening level the background noise is
way, way down there.
If you
do decide to worry about it anyway, there are a couple simple things you can do with Audacity - or pretty much any reasonable audio editing software - to reduce the noise a bit more.
1) When I listen to your closing 5 seconds of silence with my headphones cranked all the way up I can hear a
small amount of 120 Hz hum - this is almost certainly from the power supply for your computer; it's two times the frequency of household AC power. Audacity has a notch filter effect - in my copy of Audacity it's in the 'Plug ins' section of the Effect pull down menu. You can set the notch filter Frequency to 120.0 and the 'Q' to something like 10.0. This filter will try to eliminate all sound exactly at 120 Hz and leave alone all sounds at higher or lower frequencies.
2) The other noise I can see - but not hear - in your recording is some very low frequency stuff, including a ripple down around 1 Hz - that's a frequency that's totally inaudible but can show up in the noise metering. Audacity has a High Pass filter (again in the Plug Ins for my version of Audacity). I tried setting the frequency at 20.0 Hz and the rolloff at 6 dB/octave - these are
extremely cautious settings but pretty much guaranteed to have no audible effect on the voice part of your recording. I tried running the two filters I describe on your first recording and saved the result. That mp3 had a bit better than 6 dB less noise than the original. Since running the two filters takes around a minute - including the waiting time for the computer to process the effect - it's probably worthwhile.
3) Other people may need to worry about echoing sounds from the room they record in, rattles from refrigerators, meows, woofs, squaks from pets, traffic noises from outside, etc., etc. I didn't hear anything like that in your case, so you're golden.