In 2005 I wrote a vocal melody and lyrics on top of a blissy keyboard instrumental by Slavagoh. I really liked the repeating three chord progression and had planned to incorporate his recording into the French Horns demo, but decided to keep it minimal.

I kinda had always regretted that, so five years later I managed to glue those recordings together:

Both recordings were almost the same tempo, but the Slavagoh recording was about a semitone lower in key. After nudging his recording into the same key and time-stretching (thankfully both were recorded to drum machines), there were still some beat mismatches on the ends to deal with. Eventually I ended up with three instances of “untitled bliss” spliced in because I really liked how its ending had this smoother sound and how that part mixed with earlier parts of the track.

My demo was also bass-heavy, too dark in the vocal range, and overly punchy on some beats, so I did a bunch of surgical volume cuts and EQ on my track before mixing.

Wins: Extended the end of the track a bit by having the “guitar solo” twice. Worked hard on the fades at the beginning and end so the track starts and finishes with just the Slavagoh track.

Losses: Not remixing my recording from scratch to remove that annoying click track. Not using some of the violin tracks laying around from an older mix session. Not saving the session used to master it.

If you’re not patient, it’s easy to mix down and then immediately start mastering the resulting WAV file without keeping track of the changes you’re making. When you do this, there’s no way to duplicate that process in case you need to change something in the mixing session. I kinda did this on purpose though; after 5 years of sitting around I wanted to get this recording to “good enough” and move on. There’s a lot more piled up that needs working on.

Aside from the horrors of Auto-tune, the tool changed the state-of-the-art dealing with monophonic sound. Well, competitor product Melodyne will soon be able to apply pitch adjustment to polyphonic sound. This is huge. Huge. The amazing video shows this advance and a taste of the amazing power this will bring to recordists. About 2/3rds way through, it effortlessly changes the whole scale of a piece of music from minor to major, then to “Spanish”. It’s freaking amazing. [Thanks, shek-e]

The Red Book standard defined how audio was to be encoded on a CD, and it was great for 1980, but it, well, kinda sucks now.

1. The error correction is too minimal to withstand real-world abuse (cars, friends, etc.).
2. Tracking is pretty loose, and a lot of players have trouble seeking to the exact beginning of a track. And, of course, skipping is a drag.
3. Uncompressed PCM isn’t space efficient for audio.
4. Ripping is painfully slow if you want it done well, thanks to the first two.

A better (if not ideal) solution is obvious: compressed files on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM standard has a lot more error correction and tracking data built-in, and the space eaten by that that data is minimal compared to what can be saved through modern compression.

For the audiophiles, start with FLACs, then fill the remaining half of the disc with a few grades of mp3s, or license-free formats. Order the folders by increasing compression ratio so that, when you pop it in a player, you get the highest quality your player will support.

As much I want to root for Audacity for being an open source and multi-platform multitrack recording solution, it’s just not there yet. I set it up for my coworker to record lectures and, even in this light-duty (mono 44.1 recording, nothing fancy), after about 10 min of material the program starts to sputter and exhibit delays in responding. This is on a machine with a GB of RAM! Occasionally the project file becomes corrupted and, although you can open it, see the waveforms, and export, you can’t play the project anymore without a long crash. This happened this morning; I was able to export what was there, but skips and glitches made the track unusable. Even when the entire recording and mixdown does work, at every other edit point in the mixdown is an audible pop.

For all its instability, there are two very nice Audacity features that I’d love to see in Adobe Audition:

Visible RMS levels on the waveform.

This gives you a decent visual clue of how “loud” a track is across time. While RMS doesn’t equate to “loudness” (unless it uses a reverse equal-loudness contour), it’s mostly proportional to it if the overall frequencies stay the same (as with speech).

View results of volume-adjustment curves in real time

When you draw a curve you see the waveform change to the result of the curve as it will be applied, making it possible to truly dial in the exact volume change you want rather than repeatedly guessing and listening.

The above features allow you to quickly visually shape your desired loudness curve out of the existing wave. Speakers tend to gradually gain/lose volume over several minutes, so this makes compensating for that cake. These two alone make it worth keeping Audactiy around just for situations needing sharp leveling.