Sorry, Sorry, Sorry

[filkertom]

Thanks to all of you for your responses and thoughts regarding The Mysterious Audio Whine. I appreciate it a lot.

Please forgive my frustration last night. I've been banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out precisely what I should do about the situation.

I am at least able to recognize how dumb I sound when I say aloud the words "I'm very sorry I didn't get rid of that noise I couldn't hear."

While I try to figure out what to do about files I've already recorded, I'm going to make several small changes in hardware configuration and software processing that will, I hope, get rid of the problem in the future. And I'm going to actively watch out for the noise. It'll mean a bit more work, but I don't think too much, and it will certainly be worth it, at least in peace of mind.

Sorry to get so crazy about this. But I've been priding myself on becoming a better engineer over the past couple of years. This is sticking in my craw. And knowing that I really shouldn't blame myself for not fixing a mistake I couldn't detect isn't helping.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Sympathies, guy.

[janet-coburn.livejournal.com]

It sucks to be you. Tee-hee.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Look at the bright side. You could release the fixed recording under the "Tom Smith Remasters" label, and make a mint selling it to people who already bought the album once.

Rush did it, why not you?

[popefelix.livejournal.com]

I think hlynna and I would buy it. :)

[thingunderthest.livejournal.com]

I am so used to high frequency noise that I pretty much filter this stuff out unless it is brought to my attention, or if it gives me a headache like some florescent ballasts and some microwaves.

The MAW on your recordings doesn't bother me in the least, but I love your material for the narrative content and that comes across flawlessly.

[darkwolf69.livejournal.com]

I hear you, man. It sounds like you're feeling really frustrated with yourself because (a) you want to provide good quality work to your fans, (b) you want to do good quality work because you want to be good at your job, and (c) you want to be more forgiving of your own mistakes.

Believe me, I feel the same way every time I find a bug in my code at work, or when I deliver what seems to me to be substandard GMing performace at one of my games. I am the King of the Self-Kicked-Ass, no lie. :-)

You know what I've found, though? Mostly, people are way more forgiving of my faults than I am. Funny thing, eh?

Geek Sidebar

[darkwolf69.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that there ought to be command line audio filtering tools available someplace, that you could throw entire directories of files at... It's something to look into, at any rate. If you find a tool that only runs under Linux, I'm sure that someone you know (*cough*) could help you out on that score. ;-)

[mikewdotorg.livejournal.com]

Don't sweat it! You're doing fine Tom!

You're trying to make the best product possible, and we all understand that, and I'm grateful for it. You're doing a hundred times better than most "commercial" artists who just slap out crap after crap and never really care as long as the money keeps rolling in.

I'm not an audio engineer although I do like to play with things like this. It seems to me that darkwolf is right, there should be a command line tool (or GUI batch processor) that you can just feed your vocal track through with a passband filter and then remerge it with the rest of the song.

Keep up the good work!

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

It's possible. Sound Forge 8 has batch processing. I'd work with copies of the original vocal tracks, of course.

I'm going to be going over all my audio tools in the next few days, and seeing what does what. Thankfully, there are lots of good VST effect plug-ins out there, and a number of them are free or inexpensive.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Tom, I don't think you need to apologize for being upset about a defect in your work, even if you didn't know it was there despite the amount of time and effort you spend on it. If you didn't care about doing a good job, you wouldn't have made a big deal about it. (In fact, if you were like mainstream music producers, you would have deliberately kept quiet about it and hoped nobody noticed. And if anyone did, you would have claimed they were nuts.) That's not something to apologize for, it's something to be proud of.

[bedlamhouse]

In fact, if you were like mainstream music producers, you would have deliberately kept quiet about it and hoped nobody noticed

You wanna give a cite for a situation where the producer actually tried to ignore, deny, or argue with people about a mistake? That kind of slam is saying that producers at the mainstream level don't just have different tastes, they also don't care about their jobs on a creative level. While it might be just as true of some as it is true of those in any profession, it is insulting to the best of mainstream producers to lump them all together as slugs who don't care about the results of their creative work.

Just because it is mainstream does not necessarily mean it is unethical or sloppy.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

When I said "producers" I wasn't actually thinking of the technical guys who do the work, I was thinking of the executive slime that send in their dues to the RIAA. I won't apologize for saying nasty things about the management of the commercial music industry, but I will agree that the people whose job title is "producer" are mostly honest people trying to do a good job, and I didn't mean to slam them.

[infobits.livejournal.com]

Wondering, and not at all experienced in audio technica ...

Can you get noise from things like too many cables with not enough shielding around them? Or attenuation from too long of a cable for the signal?

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Indeed you can. Once Anne heard some odd interference in an MP3 that I'd just knocked off so she could hear the song. I hadn't listened too closely to it, and it took awhile to realize that my phantom power supply, which is normally on the opposite side of the desk from the CPU but in this instance was much closer to it (moved to make room for something else) was getting interference from my brand-new-at-the-time 500-watt power supply in the main box, which went directly into the vocal track. Moving the phantom power back across the desk got rid of the noise immediately.

[ttamsen.livejournal.com]

"What they said."

Good luck nailing the annoying little bugger, but be kind to yourself while you do it.

As someone who has been working his way through your discography backwards, I can say you sure as *hell* have improved your sound engineering from release to release. But I love 'em all, and it's the humour and the stories and the emotion that are the irrestible draw. Sure it's nice if they sound flawless too, but we all know Life Happens. I hope you can try not to let it get too on top of you.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Hey, you provided a useful example for me in class today...that's gotta count for something, right? (Wish I could remember how I tied this into communities and community-standards, but it was good at the time.)

[hms42]

Tom - I have not heard this bug in anything I have gotten from you in the past year and a half. I still have the mp3s from LHOE on my travelling mp3 player. As for improvements in quality... Since you know the problem exists, you fix it (and you will find it easier to fix now than you would have a year ago.) and continue to keep any eye out for issues such as that. I did a major error on a CD (volume levels) that got published last fall. It was already at the duplicator when it was discovered to have a problem. If I caught it earlier, it would have been fixed.

Don't beat yourself up over this error. I recently listened to something I recorded about 2 years ago and now, I feel that its so bad of quality, I reconverted the audio tape to get a CLEAN copy for myself, so I could listen to it. Then, I was just happy to get it into the computer. Now, I don't accept that poor of quality.

Harold