What's your "recording studio" like?

Kristen · Post by **Kristen** » September 26th, 2005, 12:57 am

Mine is at my desk at home, with the door to the veranda closed to minimize the noise of passing trains.

I use an Olympus Voice-Trek V-20 and a Sony ECM MS907 microphone.

To transfer the recordings, I plug the Voice-Trek into the USB port on my G5 and copy it over. So simple and the quality is crisp and clear.

The Voice-Trek records WMA files, so I use EasyWMA to convert them, before opening up in Audacity to edit.

In my studio, I also have a beautiful M-Audio Nova mic on a stand and a Behringer 6-track mixer, but the Voice-Trek is so much easier that I hardly ever use the expensive stuff anymore.

Post by **hugh** » September 26th, 2005, 6:51 am

I use a cheapo Sony F-V220 microphone (C$24.99), that plugs straight into my dell laptop's mic jack (my ibook does not have a mic jack, which makes me angry).

I record & edit using Audacity, then export to mp3 and/or ogg.

There's a fair bit of background buzz on my recordings, so I may look into upgrading the mic, and getting some kind of preamp. any suggestions?

GordMackenzie · Post by **GordMackenzie** » September 26th, 2005, 7:30 am

I use a headset with mic to record directly into my laptop.

It's a relatively inexpensive mid-range headset, and I do get a fair bit of noise when I record. I use Audacity to edit, and try to use the noise reduction filter to get rid of the static ... but it's tricky to get that to work well and the quality of the recording gets reduced overall (IMHO).

g/

kayray · Post by **kayray** » September 26th, 2005, 9:26 am

I set my iBook on the coffee table and sit on the floor so I can position my mouth as near the built-in pinhole mic as possible. There's some noise and it certainly doesn't sound like a professional recording, but it's tolerable. I just ordered a "MacMice MicFlex USB Microphone" ($30-ish) from powermax.com; that should improve things somewhat for future readings.

I record with Sound Studio in smallish 10-15 minute sections (my iBook doesn't enjoy dealing with files larger than that), convert to mp3 with lame, then glue the resulting files together with cat in the terminal.

UPDATE: My MacMice mic added an annoying squeaky background sound to my recordings. I now have a Logitech USB mic (about $30 from Best Buy) which works like a charm. It's way more sensitive than my old mic so I just need to add a bit of compression to the finished files. And I have recently acquired a nice new iMac so I can record entire chapters at one go! Yay!

UPDATE (June 4, 2007) -- As of my birthday last year, my microphone situation has improved. I now use an M-Audio USB interface and an AKG Perception 100 condensor mic.

Kara

tis · Post by **tis** » September 26th, 2005, 4:28 pm

My setup is very like Hugh's; a cheap microphone plugged into a desktop PC in the library, recording directly into Audacity.

I don't have a lot of background most of the time, but for about thirty seconds in each chapter I've been getting very bad noise; I have no idea why. Still, at least it's easy to rerecord and edit!

Kristen · Post by **Kristen** » September 26th, 2005, 5:45 pm

kayray wrote:glue the resulting files together with cat in the terminal.

Kara, you rock. So old-school unix!

damien · Post by **damien** » September 26th, 2005, 7:24 pm

I'm using an AKG Perception 200 condensor Mic connected to a PreSonus Firebox to my iMac G5. I'm recording in Garageband, and then exporting to MP3 from there.

The trick is I need to finish reading the chapters so I can RELEASE them

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » September 29th, 2005, 8:52 pm

I have a Tascam US-428 analog/digital converter / mixer box, which connects to my Powerbook by USB. I would record to my faster eMac, except that its fan is far too noisy. I hook a Sony Beta-58 mic to the 428 and record in Sound Studio (OS X).

The Beta mic is more of a live performance mic, not ideal for audiobooks, but it's pretty high quality. I have it on a mic stand with a quality pop filter by Shure -- without this there'd be a lot more imPlosives on my recordings. As it is, there still are a few!

I'm a songwriter (at least was, it's been a while since i've recorded anything new) so I have a fair amount of home studio experience.

I edited out a lot of the breathing and lipsmack sounds by using the Amplitude filter in Sound Studio: select the waveform chunk, run the filter and set it close to 0. I also use the Normalize filter to maximize the volume of the entire recording. Have not done any EQ as of yet but I'm sure the recordings would benefit from this.

Anyway, once I have the guts to upload my 3 Wodehouse chapters, let me know what you think!

Aaron

Post by **hugh** » September 29th, 2005, 9:07 pm

looking forward to them aaron!

Squiddhartha · Post by **Squiddhartha** » October 3rd, 2005, 7:12 am

One of my other hobbies is doing the sound and video in the main events rooms for local science fiction and anime conventions, so I already had more microphones, stands, cables, and such than would ever be needed for this project. I just rigged up my sound board, plugged in a condenser mic, and ran the outputs into the line-in on my PowerBook, where I'm running Audacity.

damien · Post by **damien** » October 4th, 2005, 8:09 pm

Squiddhartha wrote:One of my other hobbies is doing the sound and video in the main events rooms for local science fiction and anime conventions, so I already had more microphones, stands, cables, and such than would ever be needed for this project. I just rigged up my sound board, plugged in a condenser mic, and ran the outputs into the line-in on my PowerBook, where I'm running Audacity.

I've had an issue getting Audacity running on either my PowerBook and iMac G5 both running 10.4.2... are there any known issues with it?

Squiddhartha · Post by **Squiddhartha** » October 4th, 2005, 8:18 pm

Huh, I've never had any trouble with it -- what sort of issues are you experiencing? I'm running 10.4.2 as well.

alexfoster · Post by **alexfoster** » October 5th, 2005, 7:11 am

Mine is just amid the clutter on my desk. I use my desktop to display the text and the laptop to do the recording, because for some reason there's a hum on the desktop.

I've borrowed my other half's mic -- he used to use it for making electronic music but has a better one now. It's an odd thing with both size audio jacks on it. A Ross RE-325.

I don't have a mic stand, so the it sits in a full toilet roll. I found there was way too much tapping noise if I used it without a stand. Now all I have to do is remember not to fidget on the desk as I read.

theatrekid12 · Post by **theatrekid12** » December 10th, 2005, 8:44 pm

I have an mp3 player with a microphone. I sit on my bed put it on my pillow and start talking. It works okay. I wish I had something better.
Andrew

Stephan · Post by **Stephan** » December 21st, 2005, 8:48 pm

Notes on my setup:

First, here is how i sound: http://www.moebius.mynetcologne.de/librivox/Soundsnippet_Stephan.mp3
Sorry about the booming basses. I will get rid of em.

Computer
PC with Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS, in the living room.
Comment on the Audigy: I?d say that the difference in quality only matters to an audiophile...or you?re a hardcore gamer - else, save some money and use onboard sound!
I may add proudly that i handcrafted watercooling into the much too small PC and spend some bucks on Harddrive-Dampening! Its very quiet and almost doesn?t intersperse into the recording or into my livingroom first of all. The PC-noise you can hear in some LibriVox books.
That HardDrive dampening was worth every penny and i recommend it to everyone against the noise. http://www.pcsilent.de/depd_silentmaxx_festplatten_daemmung_hdd_silencer-pcshd1.asp
Also you could try two or three aditional meter of cable and read on the couch, perhaps? More relaxed voice included!

Headset: Plantronics audio 90
17€
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000665P5/qid=1135221579/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-8458108-4797740?n=507846&s=electronics&v=glance
Its speakers are mediocre to good. The mic is quite good and the reason why gamers often chose this headset. Noisecancelling. The cables are unexpectedly long of the Audio90. You can wear the speakers for hours with few strain. Its solid enough. Absolute noteworthy: It?s cloth and not foam on the pads! Foam is dust after two years - Cloth isn?t. What would you expect for 17$ Well done plantronics.

Software (i don?t know Audacity yet.)

Total Recorder to conveniently record my voice-stream. mp3 encoding on the fly. No worry about saving.
Mp3DirectCut for VERY convenient editing, cutting, concatting. Its a program made for cutting. Often no re-encoding needed!!
Goldwave for NoiseReduction, Equalizer, Smoothing and some barely noticable reverb (reverb, imho, helps a bit against headset effect. "You sound so NEAR! EEEK! Go away!") You can pre-listen to the effects before you apply.
MP3-Gain to make all recorded files the same loudness in a breeze, if needed.