Will Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 165 posts - 165 votes
| Message 33 of 44 04 February 2007 at 2:20am | IP Logged |
Workerbee, I know what you are trying to do and I have Audacity 1.2.6 installed but up to this time I have never used it.
Anyhows, in the Audacity Help menu click on Contents and in the Search tab do a search on the word split. Maybe that information about the Edit Menu will be of help, the Split or Duplicate info. May be of help, may not be.
Good luck to you.
I'll add that I know you probably looked at the help section of Audacity before posting and nothing is really going to do the splitting automatically, not even Polderbits will do it flawlessly. You'd still have to set where one track ends and another begins. The options in Audacity's Edit menu are most likely your best bet.
Edited by Will on 04 February 2007 at 2:59am
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Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6878 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 34 of 44 05 February 2007 at 5:19am | IP Logged |
AFAIK automatic split functions are based on detecting an interval of silence between tracks. This will work well enough for music most of the time but is no good at all for language lessons where you will have plenty of silent intervals within the same lesson too.
It is very unlikely that you will ever be able to automate this sort of thing.
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Will Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 165 posts - 165 votes
| Message 35 of 44 05 February 2007 at 7:29am | IP Logged |
Workerbee, download this zip file. It has some instructions that may help you out. The zip file only contains three graphics and an html page in a folder.
May be an easier way to do it but I think this might be a way.
Zip File
Edited by Will on 05 February 2007 at 10:21am
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workerbee Senior Member United States Joined 6835 days ago 173 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 36 of 44 06 February 2007 at 8:17am | IP Logged |
Thanks Will for the info. I will get to play with your technique hopefully this weekend! I love having all of this technology to furthur my language learning--I wish I could use it all easily. (It almost seems like a mini language all its own.)
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Will Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 165 posts - 165 votes
| Message 37 of 44 06 February 2007 at 1:46pm | IP Logged |
You didn't ask for the information but I'll offer it. If not you, the information may help someone else. I don't know if you have ever digitized a cassette tape before but some digitized files made from recorded media can suffer from background noise that is known as Tape Hiss.
It may be that your cassette recordings are fine and the tape hiss, if any, is not unbearable to your ears. In such cases nothing further needs to be done to the recordings. The world is peachy keen.
In other cases the tape hiss may prove to be a distraction to the recording and you may desire to diminish the tape hiss as much as possible. In such cases what you will want to do is record your cassette side into Audacity and then save a copy of that recording as a wav format file.
I see in Audacity contents that it has something called Noise Reduction built into it. I have never used Audacity's noise reduction before but you may wish to try it on tape hiss before trying another program. You would open the wav format file of your cassette recording with Audacity and then try the noise reduction on the tape hiss per the instructions for noise reduction found in Audacity's help contents. Then you would do the dividing of the different tracks and saving them into MP3 files. You could just record the media into Audacity and try the noise reduction on the recording but first saving a copy of the recording in wav format provides you a back-up copy of the recording.
When I used to have need to digitize recordings I used a program called Depopper with decent success to remove background noise. There may be free noise removal programs available but I haven't looked for any in a long time.
If using a program for noise reduction what you would want to do is open the wav format file you made and do the noise removal. Then save a copy of that cleaned up audio into wav format. Then open that saved wav format file with Audacity and continue with the MP3 making.
I don't know of any programs that will remove background noise from Mp3 files. So any noise needs to be removed before getting to the making of the Mp3s stage.
Might seem like a lot is involved and it is, but it isn't really difficult. Plus, once you have a decent recording of your cassette digitized you never have to do the redigitizing again. Unless of course the digitized recording is lost somehow.
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workerbee Senior Member United States Joined 6835 days ago 173 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 38 of 44 09 February 2007 at 9:11pm | IP Logged |
Wow, Will you did read my mind before I even had the thought! I know that some of my tapes do have a hiss. Hopefully these tips can help me fix it.
Thanks very much!
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Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6878 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 39 of 44 16 February 2007 at 1:08pm | IP Logged |
Hencke wrote:
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. |
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OK , just to let you all know that I finally got around to trying out the noise removal function in Audacity on these tapes.
The results ? Well, I have mixed feelings about them actually: It quite successfully removed the annoying echoes in the gaps, which was the main problem with the recordings, but at the same time I feel the sound quality suffered a little. It sounds even a little more "hollow" after filtering.
But nothing is perfect and I suppose that noise removal function did about all you CAN do with such a poor original.
At least it made a difference, and it is definitely the filtered versions I will be listening to from now on.
Edited by Hencke on 16 February 2007 at 1:09pm
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magic9man2 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6613 days ago 149 posts - 153 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Arabic (Written), Mandarin, French, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Taiwanese, Arabic (Levantine)
| Message 40 of 44 04 April 2008 at 10:24pm | IP Logged |
ik this is an old topic, but on audacity's site I can't download 1.3.2 beta, only 1.3.4, and it doesn't seem to be working the same way. Anybody know where to get 1.3.2?
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