[Note: I'm writing this all with a tone that you don't know this stuff, but I don't mean it to sound condescending. You might know this. You might know it well! I'm just not sure and I'm too sleepy to write properly open-to-any-knowledge-level text at the moment. So don't take this as indicative that I'm talking down to you about this. Hopefully!]
Advice for improvement:
All I can offer is advice on audio file improvement, since I'm not a writer or a reader. However, there's some hum and buzz in the recording, and it's quite quiet (which exacerbates the first problem because once you turn your volume up louder to hear it well, the buss and hum become louder). There are some ways to get rid of buzz and hum during the recording process, but given an audio file, you can also reduce it quite well afterward by using a noise reduction tool. I use one called SoundSoap by BIAS Inc. which is actually very good and easy to use (but costs a chunk of coin). All you do is find a two-second segment of silence in your recording and press the big button to sample the noise. It then has a profile of what the noise is lik e and can do a pretty good job of removing it from your audio. It has two knobs that let you adjust how intensely it does this to strike the best balance of getting rid of the noise while not making you sound like a robot in a tin chamber.
The other thing is about the volume. Volume is trickier than it sounds. The first step most people take to address volume is called normalizing. Normalizing will raise the volume such that the highest audio peak in your file is at the maximum volume. This seems like a sensible thing in that you're going to get the highest possible volume without clipping or distortion. However, when you just normalize, your recordings never sound as "hot" as commercial recordings. This is because commercial recordings take a few extra steps.
One step is compression. If you think of an audiofile as a plot with time on the X axis and sound pressure on the vertical axis (the usual way audio files are viewed), then this is basically taking the whole thing and compressing it toward the middle -- reducing the total dynamic range between the loudest parts and the quietest parts. Very picky listeners of classical music probably hate compression. However, most recordings do not actually have or want as much dynamic range as they started with, because if one part of your song is very very quiet and one part is very very loud, people are going to blow out their eardrums or sit there adjusting their volume constantly. The same applies to readings, where your voice goes through a lot of changes in volume. If you remember that you're going to move the volume up toward the maximum without clipping anyway, then you can see that compression, reducing the dynamic range, allows you to move it up even further and brings the quietest parts up toward the louder parts. If you use it too heavily, your piece will be brash and obnoxious and lack texture, but used sparingly, it'll give it more overall energy.
no subject
Advice for improvement:
All I can offer is advice on audio file improvement, since I'm not a writer or a reader. However, there's some hum and buzz in the recording, and it's quite quiet (which exacerbates the first problem because once you turn your volume up louder to hear it well, the buss and hum become louder). There are some ways to get rid of buzz and hum during the recording process, but given an audio file, you can also reduce it quite well afterward by using a noise reduction tool. I use one called SoundSoap by BIAS Inc. which is actually very good and easy to use (but costs a chunk of coin). All you do is find a two-second segment of silence in your recording and press the big button to sample the noise. It then has a profile of what the noise is lik e and can do a pretty good job of removing it from your audio. It has two knobs that let you adjust how intensely it does this to strike the best balance of getting rid of the noise while not making you sound like a robot in a tin chamber.
The other thing is about the volume. Volume is trickier than it sounds. The first step most people take to address volume is called normalizing. Normalizing will raise the volume such that the highest audio peak in your file is at the maximum volume. This seems like a sensible thing in that you're going to get the highest possible volume without clipping or distortion. However, when you just normalize, your recordings never sound as "hot" as commercial recordings. This is because commercial recordings take a few extra steps.
One step is compression. If you think of an audiofile as a plot with time on the X axis and sound pressure on the vertical axis (the usual way audio files are viewed), then this is basically taking the whole thing and compressing it toward the middle -- reducing the total dynamic range between the loudest parts and the quietest parts. Very picky listeners of classical music probably hate compression. However, most recordings do not actually have or want as much dynamic range as they started with, because if one part of your song is very very quiet and one part is very very loud, people are going to blow out their eardrums or sit there adjusting their volume constantly. The same applies to readings, where your voice goes through a lot of changes in volume. If you remember that you're going to move the volume up toward the maximum without clipping anyway, then you can see that compression, reducing the dynamic range, allows you to move it up even further and brings the quietest parts up toward the louder parts. If you use it too heavily, your piece will be brash and obnoxious and lack texture, but used sparingly, it'll give it more overall energy.
[...continued, this got long...]