Distortion Problems When Editing in Cool Edit 2000

[Travis G.]

Hi I use Cool Edit 2000 at work and I am having problems with distortion. There is a crackly noise that is present throughout all recordings that I open in CE. It can be seen on the waveform display so I don't think that this is a hardware issue. If I try to insert silence, the wave form goes perfectly flat. However, if I try to attenuate the noise to zero, I can't. I have not had the problem on older 32 bit OS machines that are at work. I have the problem on my 64 bit OS machine though even when I am using a 32 bit OS emulator.

All of our recordings are 8 bit PCM mono with a sample rate of 8000. 8-bit A-Law compressed.

Please help...

Travis

You can see the distortion in the selected part at the end of the soundfile.

 

[Bobbsy]

What are you using as a sound card/audio interface? I've seen exactly that problem before with quite a few "built in" sound cards (including Soundblaster rubbish) when they try to operate at low bit depth/sample rates like your 8/8000. The fact that generate silence is good (i.e. a sound not recorded through the audio interface sort of lends credence to that theory.

I'm afraid I never bothered to see if there was a solution (other than an interface happy to work in 8 bit) because I never record at those settings.

Hmmm...just a thought....what happens if you record and edit at something like 16 bit/44.1kHz and only convert the file at the end?

 

[Travis G.]

Thank you Bobby. I have an external sound card lying around, although it is an older Soundblaster. I'm hoping that solves the problem. Hopefully it works better then the one that's in there.

I don't know offhand what sound card is in my machine at work. I never do recording on my machine. Recording is done on a different computer I then have to crop them and sometimes splice them or remove unwanted pops etc. Anyway I'm hoping it wouldn't come down to having to record at a higher bit depth because then I would have to convert it at the end which adds another step. On days that I have a lot of files to cut this will waste time.

 

[Seidy]

Kinda' offtopic but where do you even use such low quality files? For phone answerers?

Bobby has point, you will need a decent usb interface for recording (that Soundblaster will not be any better than what is in the computer at the moment). On a second thought maybe even usb mic will work.

 

[Bobbsy]

Kinda' offtopic but where do you even use such low quality files? For phone answerers?

Bobby has point, you will need a decent usb interface for recording (that Soundblaster will not be any better than what is in the computer at the moment). On a second thought maybe even usb mic will work.

Must admit I was wondering that myself but also guessed it was phone related. Years ago some video games also demanded low sample rates and bit depth (I sold a few sound effects about 20 or 25 years ago but that's all changed with high quality surround sound games.

Regarding a USB mic, I believe most of them are limited to 44.1 or 48 kHz sample rates.