Audio degradation in a good way..

[mrclay]

Hi, I just recorded a demo of a little Tom Waits-ish song
using only one SM58 for a mono recording of vocal, acoust gtr, and bass. Although it was just a demo, when I converted it to small mp3 file with halved sample rate I actually like the sound a lot more than the original 16/44.1 wave.. Is there some sort of processing I could run a mix through to get those a nice archaic tape quality w/o the poor resolution and artifacts of mp3 conversion?

[dobro]

Hey, pretty interesting. What happens when you convert a 16/44 wav file into a lower res wav file?

I've experimented with EQ, just really pinching the waveform until it starts to sound like 1920s or 30s recordings. The waveform gets all emaciated, like turning a grape into a raisin or something.

Now all we need is comething that adds scratches.

[regebro]

Originally posted by dobro
Now all we need is comething that adds scratches.

EZ: Sample the silence of some well used vinylrecords.

[mrclay]

>EZ: Sample the silence of some well used vinylrecords.

Actually I've done this to great effect on another song, so I'll try that, too. Maybe The biggest effect of the reduction is the big dropoff in freq response so I'll fiddle around with some brick wall FFT filtering in CoolEdit.. Also what what be nice is a sort of randomized volume trim around +/-1dB..