Offer new services to existing clients - Instructional media

I have been doing some volunteer transcribing for IntegralLife.com  a favorite organization that promotes the work of one of the world's great philosophical theorists. In appreciation, they offered to enroll me in one of their new courses. But, the opening words of the opening module caught my attention. I said to myself: "Self," I said, "You can make this sound better. Why don't you just have a go at it?" And so I did.

I prepared the following brief sample and offered to discuss their using my audio services as well. Time will tell... I'm already doing this work for random clients. I would really enjoy working with some of the finest people I know on some of the most important topics I have ever encountered. Note to self: People who already know you in one context have a hard time imagining you in an other. Be patient.

This picture simply shows a short phrase being repeated before and after processing. The low end of the spectrogram shows less low-end room "boominess" in the right side.  Also, look closely at the trailing edge of the peaks. On the right side, there is more-obvious fall-off as you hear less of the original sound lingering in the recording space.

It's fun to watch the processing finish and all the waveforms grow different shoulders as the display refreshes.

I also enjoy working in the iZotope RX editor to remove pauses in the X-axis (time) and unwanted sounds in the Y-axis (amplitude).

• After selecting a horizontal area, pressing [Delete] simply closes-up the remaining content at zero crossing points.
• If [Instant Process] is turned on, a new selection is automatically rendered with the desired function (such as replacing an unwanted noise with a signal based on a sample of background room noise). 

In both cases it's like it never even happened. I feel like Luke Skywalker shooting womp rats.

Alternating samples

This section contains only "alternating samples." That is to say that:

• Each sample contains a series of phrases. 
• Each phrase is repeated once for before-and-after comparison.

These samples are for demonstration purposes. Many samples are rather severely treated to demonstrate what can be done. In real life, for instance, you might want to leave a little of the room echo for "realism."

President Obama's ISIS address

Removed overall background noise, room echo plus individual sibilance and mouth noises. (Yes, I really over-did it on the sibilance.)

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Episode of "Cooking Hawaiian Style"

Frank Abraham produces Cooking Hawaiian Style, and sent an episode to work on. The good news is that there was a lot to love and it cleaned-up very nicely. The bad news is that one of the microphone inputs sounded as if it was severely over-driven and clipped.

I'll talk about the minor issues first. Here's a few seconds of the original recording.

The voices are too low to start with (Total RMS = -35.45 dB) and the background noise (the two selected areas) is too high (Minimum RMS = -51.11 dB). If we simply crank up the volume, we will amplify the noise as well.