increasing vol of quiet section: how to??

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downonthestreet

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I have been recording some dialogue, including a phone conversation in which one of the voices was miked coming through the earpiece of the phone. Unfortunately, I couldn't amplify the mike signal up enough for the phone voice, and on the finished recording the voices recorded directly through the mike are far louder than the phone voice.

Has anyone got some tips on how to bring up the quiet phone voice, please?

I have tried normalising, hard limiting, and applying Heavy Master Limit to the whole recording, and it has brought the phone voice up a bit, but still not enough. Is there any way I can select just the quiet voice and amp it up in some way, using the editing facilities of CEP (visually, the phone voice waves are much more compressed looking than the other voices on the recording, so easy to identify)?

The last resort is to manually increase the vol recording levels on my cassette player just while the quiet phone voice is speaking when recording on to cassette tape direct from the computer, but I suspect there is a better way to bring up the quiet parts using CEP.

I know 99% of you are using CEP exclusively for music recording, but if anyone can help with this dilemma of mine, would appreciate it.

Cheers
 
downonthestreet said:
I have been recording some dialogue, including a phone conversation in which one of the voices was miked coming through the earpiece of the phone. Unfortunately, I couldn't amplify the mike signal up enough for the phone voice, and on the finished recording the voices recorded directly through the mike are far louder than the phone voice.

Has anyone got some tips on how to bring up the quiet phone voice, please?



Cheers
Click to expand...

Why don't you just use amplify/fade effects. There are planty of options like boost 6 db 3 db 12 db.
Hmm wait a minute. I don't remember of these features are in CEP.
I use Adobe Audition now.
Ok. But there is second solution.

Use effect called FFT filter. I know for sure there is this feature in CEP.
There are a lot of different presets there but you can make your own by dragging envelop on the chart.
I used it after web phone recording when signal was pretty pure.

You can save your preset by adding name of your setting to FFT filter.
Some of my names in FFT filter are 110%, 120 % 80% which tells me how much I increase /decrease signal level.
The chart line is just an ordinary horizontal line.
If you have a lot of noise, it will increase its volume too.
Make sure you get rid of it first.
FFT filter can help you with that too.

I am at work now and can't see any cool edit menu bat I think you should go to EFFECTS/FFT FILTER (when you are in EDIT WINDOW).

good luck
 
I'm assuming that both voices are on the same track and were recorded at the same time on the cassette recorder right?

I can think of two solutions off of the top of my head,

1) Insert the wave file into the multi-track onto 2 seperate tracks, label one "voice 1" and the other "voice 2", then zoom in and cut out the parts that need to be cut out so that you end up with as close to 2 seperate voice tracks as possible, then you can adjust the volume for each voice independently, there may be a little extra work required if there are any spots when both voices are talking at the same time tho, but a little bit of volume envelope automation should help out. When done, mixdown to a single mono or stereo track.

2) With the the wave file opened in the edit view zoom in to the areas where the quiet voice is, mark the area, then go to, effects/amplitude/amplify, and boost that section of the recording by however many db's is needed, if it doesn't come out right the first time, just hit undo, and start over, it may take several tries to get it right, when done, save it as a different name than the original file or else CEP will overwrite it, that way you can later go back to the original if you need to.
 
Why not just toy with Amplitude->Dynamics to see if you can run it through a real heavy compressor/limiter and boost?

RonC
 
Simple answer... Effects>Dynamic Processing> Preset 4:1 Hard

That setting will level out your entire track, but may also cause a bit of distortion on the phone voice. Try it out. It's the simplest form.

Otherwise, i'd go through the entire conversation, and manually boost the levels of the quiter voice via Normalization or Hard Limiting, not amplifying.
 
I had a cassette of telephone interviews made during the sixties made with a telephone recorder where the voice at the other end was almost inaudible. I used light noise reduction (several times) to separate the voice from the background, then ran it through a highpass filter (I forget how it was set, but the material you have will dictate that) and then EQ'd to bring out the intelligibility and voice characteristics. It's something that requires a lot of experimentation. This was done at the request of a retired professor from the local state U and I gave it up when it became clear that what he really wanted was not to learn how to do it but for me to do all 16 hours for free. I guess he was used to graduate students doing all his lifting for him. I sent him home with after a tutorial and the last I heard he had a graduate student (!) doing it for him.
 
Thanks guys -

I've just selected the low vol phone voice in Edit and amplified it by 10DB twice - that brings it up loud enough (possibly slightly too loud, now!). I've mixed down and the result is pretty good, although there is now a bit of a lift in background noise when the amped up parts come in (have run Noise Reduction and normalised the whole recording, but the increased background noise is still there). Quite acceptable for my current purposes, however.

I will also try the various things you've advised and see what turns out best.

This is a great BB - any time I've had problems, there has been an abundance of great advice almost immediately. I started off knowing absolutely NOTHING about HD recording and CEP (IP Deluxe will vouch for that!), and am still on my training wheels, but on a steep learning curve and starting to really enjoy this software and its incredible possibilities. Thanks again.
 
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