Recording Video: audio on tape goes up and down
 

Hi

I just captured a concert from one of my old tapes and i while i was capping it i noticed that the audio on the tape would go up and down.. sorta like someone playing with the volume button. Anyways.. I was wondering is there a way i can normalize the audio with some program to even out these "swells"? or am i outta luck? Ive tried accouple of programs like cooledit 2000, but i am not very good with it..

thanks

tks

Hi TKS,

Encode your audio (WAV) with HeadAC3he, and it should be automatically normalized to 100%.

-kwag

The problem with "swells" in source audio is, that the analyzer of a normalizing engine like in HeadAC3che or Besweet thinks at the first highest point of a swell that this is the max. volume during the WHOLE audio track! He analyzes the track as a whole and so he can't figure out which "peak" means highest volume in the track and which "peak" is just a swell.

If a normalizer would perform the intensity at every part of the ausio individually ... the result would be a audio track which sounds like handled by an extreme "Compressor" which kills the whole dynamic of the audio track and not only at the swell-parts.

But what you can do is one "crazy" thing ;-) :

Load the audiotrack into CoolEdit and perform during the whole audiotrack a "Volume LFO" ... crazy, yes, but it makes sense, maybe CoolEdit contains a LFO option.

Find out the offset where the LFO should begin and the frequency of the LFO which is needed to hit exactly the opposite of the up and down Volume frequency of the Track. A LFO is an "Low Frequency Oscillator" and performs exactly the same: swells! ;-)

Its a hard work if you will find out the intensity and the frequency of this LFO but maybe your recording is one of the most important things in your life ... in this case it makes sense ... just only trying ... I enjoyed the same problem a long time ago and I did it on a MAC with another aplication and it worked. The crazyiest work was to figure out the exact frequency of the Volume Swells!!!
Well it sounds much much better than before. ;-)))