The creation of tomorrow's episode of Kodsnack was a bit scary. It is another face-to-face chat, and I recorded it as usual using our trusty Zoom h2n. We have used it for quite a while now, and it often produces surpisingly good results even in noisy environments. Once a friend helped me find great settings a while back, I have rarely even touched the dials. I just set up as usual, hit record and off we went. Then I headed home, dragged the file into Audacity, squeezed it from stereo to mono hit play, and …
… ouch. That background music was loud, pretty much drowning us both out. How did this happen, what did I do wrong? I cut a little bit and tried a few filters in vain, but it was clear this was not going to be listenable.
However, one of the filters I tried was for isolating vocals, and it complained it would only work on stereo tracks. That made me drack the original track back in, and it hit me that it sounded much better. Sure, the music was still loud, but thanks to stereo separation we were both clearly audible. This could be saved!
Editing done, I am now playing around with that isolation filter, trying to remove more of that music in the middle of the soundscape. The filter is surprisingly slow, perhaps the slowest I have used so far, which limits how adventurous I feel this late at night, but it does help some more. The episode will come out, and I have added the beginnings of another editing trick to my somewhat limited repertoire.
If episode 176 comes out in stereo and is a larger download than usual, this is why.
(Yes, next time I will sound check more. And reconsider those settings, just for good measure.)