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Audacity batch mode - sort of | ||
Tags: Audio-lingual | Software | ||
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 25 of 44 21 January 2007 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, you can export files from Audacity either in .mp3 format or in the .wav format. The latter is essentially the format used for CD's, the former is common to mp3 players. Now, if you downloaded music files to your mp3 player before, you should know how to do that. The thing is, I have a computer with Windows XP Media Center Edition, but I've never used the Media Center features, so if the Media Center, or whatever it's called, is the way you handle all your music, perhaps you can import the processed lesson files in there, and then you may already know how to get them onto your mp3 player. As far as burning .wav files onto regular audio CD's, again, most likely your computer came with some software that can do that - I had Nero Burning ROM software on my old machine, but I haven't yet had the need to burn anything to a CD on a new one, so I am not even sure what CD/DVD burning software I have right now. Perhaps, just like with MP3's, you can import .wav files into your media center and burn them from there. (You may want to delete the .wav files when you are done - they take up a lot of space.) Let me know if the above is enough to get the job done. P.S. One more operation in Audacity that may interest you some day is under the "Effect->Change Tempo" menu item. It can speed up or slow down recordings. One problem I found with the Assimil Italian recordings is that the tempo of the recordings does not just seem to ramp up gradually from lesson to lesson, so you kind of have to tweak it one lesson at a time. Still, keep it in mind for the future.
Don't mention it - gotta keep that US-UK "special relationship" going. :) Edited by frenkeld on 21 January 2007 at 5:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 44 21 January 2007 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Note that many modern CD-players can also play .mp3. That way you can fit about ten times the material on each disk.
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 27 of 44 21 January 2007 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've been having a growing suspicion that my hearing isn't as good as that of most people - after trying a few, I can't, for example, imagine being able to learn a language from some of the freely available FSI recordings, which others seem to do just fine with. So, yes, I tend to overdo it with the bitrates and all that, just so I can be sure it's just me and not anything with the recordings. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 44 21 January 2007 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am struggling right now to get started with those recordings of FSI Mandarin, but the poor audio quality there is because they have been digitised from old and apparently well worn magnetic tape recordings They really sound like someone was speaking from the far end of a long corridor. And the sound seems to have magnetised through from one layer of tape to the next so during the silent gaps you get a faint "advance echo" (if that is the term ?) of the next phrase. It is quite weak but noticeable enough to affect your concentration. I was just trying to clean up one of these recordings with Audacity today and it is hard work. I'd really need a function to do it automatically - like treating all faint mumbling sounds below a certain threshold volume level as noise and replacing with silence - but I can't find that function in Audacity. Any ideas on that one ? Edited by Hencke on 21 January 2007 at 5:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 29 of 44 21 January 2007 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't explored the noise clean-up in Audacity - perhaps there is someone more experienced here who can help out. Noticing that you have Goldwave, I myself meant to ask if you found it useful for cleaning up the old recordings. In principle, one ought to be able to get somewhere - Learning Spanish Like Crazy did produce a pretty nice-sounding FSI Programmatic Spanish (that I bought from them and never used), althogh it's a bit hard to know the quality of tapes they started with. Way back when I e-mailed the LSLC owner if they would ever release the Basic Course, and at the time he was concerned about the quality of the tapes his audio engineer would have to start from, and that he wasn't sure he would be able to produce a decent enough product out of it, but he did eventually put out the Basic Course 3 & 4. Now, I don't have the Basic Course from LSLC or anyone else, so I don't know what the cleaned-up recordings are like. P.S. One thing to play with in Audacity is to drag the level indicators out of the toolbar and stretch them across the whole screen (and down as well, until they go one under the other). Then select an offending interval and play it once. The level indicator will show, in decibells, the highest sound level achieved in thse "silent" intervals. You can then try to use "Truncate Silence" operation with the threshold set just above this highest noise level. This is potentially dangerous since it may start corrupting the main text. On the other hand, the algorithm for "Truncate Silence" does not appear to be just threshold-based, so this may not work for removing speech-like echos. Try applying the same operation a few times - as I've described elsewhere in this thread, sometimes it makes a difference. As far as the "Click removal" and "Noise Removal" features, I haven't explored them at all yet. Edited by frenkeld on 21 January 2007 at 10:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 44 22 January 2007 at 2:09am | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't tried but I might give it a go now. I have a very old version of Goldwave that I haven't bothered to upgrade.
It is a little frustrating to find this function is missing in Audacity, since the functionality is already there, but not available to the user. It is already able to detect the silent spells, for the "truncate silence" function, but what I want to do is not to truncate them but to replace them with "clean" silence. I have not explored the noise removal function either but it would seem it does something different than the above. I have seen it prompts you to play an interval of sample noise first of all - what it does after that I don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 31 of 44 22 January 2007 at 8:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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Silly me - I was thinking of "Truncate Silence" the way I'd used it. As I said before, I doubt it's just threshold-based, since otherwise multiple passes would not have yielded additional gap reduction in some cases, when the first pass left too long an interval.
If you find that "Truncate Silence" can eliminate the noisy part of your recordings, while leaving the true recording intact, you can try to tweak Audacity. I have it installed on Windows and Linux, and for Linux I compiled it from source. I bet if one looks at the code for "Generate->Silence" and "Effect->Truncate Silence" operations, one may be able fairly easily to hack the latter to replace noise with silence and not truncate it, with the "silence" being determined by the same algorithm as before, so you can know in advance if the gap-finding algorithm used does the job in your case. Edited by frenkeld on 22 January 2007 at 8:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| workerbee Senior Member United States Joined 6851 days ago 173 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 32 of 44 03 February 2007 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know that I am coming in late to this audacity/goldwave /etc discussion, I just wasn't sure where to add this question...
I am converting old tapes (copyrighted, sorry) to mp3 files. I have lame and not the newest, beta version of audacity. While I love that I can encode easily from one tape, I don't get how to break the side into separate mp3 tracks.(Besides sitting by the computer and stopping the player when a lesson ends.) I bet that its easy, but I haven't had any luck yet...Anyone know how? Thanks much! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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