Sound Thinking Comment - Audacity Tips

Pokey was nice enough to send comments to me on the "Sound Thinking" post, along with some good additional information. Here it is: Hey, cool. Glad I could help. When ripping Creative Commons Licensed cassettes with Audacity, be sure to record the tape hiss at the beginning. That way you can use it's sound signature to eliminate the hiss from the rest of your rip. 1. Highlight just the white noise. Try to get as clean a sample of it as you can, without any other pops clicks, etc... 2. Click on Effect > Noise Removal > Get Noise Profile 3. click the "|<<" button to un-highlight everything, and bring your cursor back to the beginning of the track. 4. Click on Effect > Noise Removal > OK and watch as the tape hiss is removed from the whole recording. 5. Listen to a sample, and if it sounds good SAVE YOUR WORK. (Save often in audacity) If you don't like it (sometimes noise removal can give the audio a mechanical "cylon" type of sound) click undo. You might be able to play with the sliders a little and get better results, but I haven't had any luck with that. For me either it works or it doesn't. Because of the possibility of using the noise removal feature, I usually rip an entire side of a Creative Commons Licensed cassette all at once, then do the noise removal to the entire recording, and then cut the tracks up. if you think you're going to use noise removal, make sure that you have the "Auto Reverse" feature turned off of your cassette player. Your cassette player will have a different audio signature in reverse than it has in forward, wildly different in some cases. Good luck.