Hey Scott,
Im no audio guru thats for sure but I'll throw in my thoughts. Regarding the first example, instead of a laptop mic, get a decent headset mic. There are so many options out there for your recording and only money is the limit, but I have a $50 plantoronics headset mic and it works great for basic recording of voice. You wont get a studio sound out of it, but good for the price.

On the recording of the message there is a lot of hiss sound you can hear when the pastor pauses. What set up are you using right now for that? What kind of microphone and recording equipment is being used?

We record our live sermons with the pastor wearing a decent headset mic plugged into a Maudio unit. It sounds pretty good for a live recording considering how low budget it is. You can hear an example of the sermon HERE. I do basic editing in Fission, then add the music in Garageband on a mac. Thats pretty much it.
I'm doing it on the low budget end of things. But it works.

Scott -

Great to see another EFCA church plant tech guy around here. I use Audacity to record the sermons for our church. I am certainly not an expert but am getting a little better through trial and error. I found out a while into this that using the Gain control to adjust levels works much better than using the Normalize or Amplify plugins. In the case of the second sermon, the question will probably be how bad the clipping is on the original recording, if you save the project in Audacity's native format, you may be able to salvage it by reducing the gain before your export to a WAV or mp3. If you reduce the gain and then export, does this make a difference?

I think it may also be helpful for us to know more about your set up. What kind of equipment are you using and how are you connecting the sound system to the computer. Finally, because you are in a school, the audio recording will vary each week based on little changes that happen with your setup and who is running your sound system. For example, the gain on our main amp gets bumped when we move it, and frequently the setup crew forgets to adjust it to the right setting. The sound board volunteer then has to compensate by adjusting the level on the soundboard, which in turn affects the audio going into Audacity. In other words, expect to do a little bit of clean up every week.

I hope some of this is helpful.

John

A little trick that Mr. Rob Feature taught me is to have the highest gaim coming into your recording device that doesn't go into the red. This way don't get the clipping issues of it being too much and it's not to quiet where you have to boost it.

Any time you try to boost a quiet recording after it's been recorded it will sound worse than if you had more when it came in. Just don't go to hot. Turning it up in the software is like taking a small image and resizing it bigger. It will be pixelated and not nearly as good as if you had it natively that size.

In the next episode we will talk about recording setups in your church and touch on some good ways to get a signal recorded.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mattfarina.com

Matt -

I agree, but it doesn't always work out that way in my church. On my soundboard, we have a USB out that we use to pipe into the computer. The gain for this USB is tied to the master volume. When the gain on the amp is set too high, the master volume has to be kept low to avoid blowing out the audience, or I have to sneak around behind the curtain at the front of the church to adjust the amp. It is one of those nuisances that comes with being a portable church.

Also, when someone else oversees the audio, I can't control the settings they use.

As a result, I use the gain in the Audacity software to adjust some. There are at least two other ways to adjust the volume: the Amplify plugin and the Normalize plugin. Using the software gain produces a much cleaner volume adjustment. I have also been able to make a recording that was a little too hot sound better. It just depends on how hot the recording was. My comment was suggestion to see if this setting might reduce some of the clipping on Scott's recording.

John

Thought I'd weigh in on a couple things here:

1. What MF says is mostly right, but his terminology could be confusing. The word "gain" is dangerous in audio because it means something specific which can be damaging if it was "as high as possible".
MF is really referring to the recording level being as hot as possible, without overdriving, on the recorder input. If your signal isn't high enough going into the recorder your recording will always sound like crap! This is important...many folks think "it's digital, so I can just turn it up in the mix". But that's not true. It is digital but you will still get bad sounding audio if you use post-production to optimize your levels. So, just beware, the quality of your input WILL equal the quality of your output, there's no fudging that.

2. As far as input of your recorder being tied to the output of your live mixer...that's where you really need to fix some things. And, imagine that, we talk about exactly this issue on next week's podcast.
One way or another, you need to get a different mix feeding your recorder than goes out to your live speakers. It's crucial and it need not cost any more money...it's just a matter of thinking through your setup.
This is another place where, if your input can't be optimized, your recording will never sound very good (or in this case, not be predictable).

Now, I won't make you wait until next week....the key here is your aux outputs. You need to setup your system and reserve one aux output for recording (or another output type that can have a different mix). So, you'll route your aux output to your recorder input, and then you'll have an entire second mix reserved just for your recording.

If you don't have any other outputs (which would be very rare) there are other options, such as splitting your pastors mic before inputting to the console and sending it directly to your recorder. Not ideal but an option. This is a must in setting up your recorder...if you rely on your house mix to provide your recording mix, you'll be outta luck on a decent sounding podcast.

-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com

Thanks for all the input. I did try going back to the original files in audacity's native format, lowering the "gain" or output volume, and re-exporting to mp3. It lowered the volume but didn't reduce the annoying sound of the clipping. I tried a variety of plug-in filters on it -- including one whose title suggested it was intended to reduce clipping -- but nothing really seemed to be a net improvement. It sounded to me as though what was annoying me was in a narrow frequency range, so I tried through trial and error to use EQ and notch filters to cut it out -- and at one point I think I made a little improvement, but at the expense of the overall sound quality. I think we'll leave it alone and just try to get better input next time.

WRT the intro on the first message, I know I'll need to use a better microphone (probably a headset) but I wanted to do a quick and dirty practice run in order to learn how to edit together the lead-in background track, the narration, and the message. That went pretty well, I thought.

Scott -

I wasn't sure if it would help. When the source file has a bad glitch, there is only so much that can be done. Your best bet is probably to listen to the upcoming podcast episode and do what Matt and Rob suggest to get the best audio.

John