Thursday, May 11, 2006

Crackling Snowball

I'm having some trouble with my podcast recordings: some recordings, but not others, contain periodic bursts of noise (crackles). For example, I recorded _The Night Land_ chapter 1 in two parts, and then chapter 2 in two parts, on the same night, under the same conditions, in the same room. The second, third, and fourth files recorded that night have strange bursts of crackles, maybe a brief crackle every fifteen seconds to two minutes.

It isn't distortion from overloaded audio. It occurs even when I'm not speaking. Dammit! That text in particular is quite tricky to read, and took me hours, and I don't get a lot of time to work on it. It sounds terrible, but the idea of having to re-record the whole files makes me want to abandon this project altogether. I guess for now I am going to go ahead and use those files, but it sounds terrible, and I don't have a good way to clean up the noise in the file itself.

Is it the microphone? The software? The cables? The external FireWire dive? The laptop? The cable? I don't know. Why did it just start on one particular session, and again on the next session too? I'm going to try again with different recording software, but this is quite discouraging...

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