Marcia2058 wrote:Extremely poor audio quality. Can't make out anything. :(
Love this site and all the audios, but respectfully, many of the recordings are just extremely difficult to hear. While others come through loud and clear. I was looking forward to this new one as Ms Ally has become one of my fav's!
You should be able to turn up your volume, Marcia. But there is a lot of low-frequency noise due to gusts of air via vocalization (e.g., "popping P's") on the recording.
Below is some general recording advice that may come in handy:
A piece of software to make recordings that I can highly recommend is Audacity. Audacity is a completely free and open source sound recorder and editor. It's a professional-grade piece of software. One can learn more about it on the below Audacity websites:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/
Among other things, one valuable feature of Audacity is that it can edit recordings, e.g., edit out material and also join seperate recording sessions together. That way one doesn't have to record the entire audio in one go, and if one desires to correct a mistake one can make a cut right before the mistake while joining a later session in order to create a seamless whole.
And experiment with the input level of the microphone. Setting the input level too high will cause clipping, which doesn't sound good (you'll know it when you hear it). Setting it too low will just cause more noticable hormonic distortion (HD) due to the background "fuzz" generated by all electrical equipment, since one has to apply more amplification to hear the audio at a decent level, hence causing this background fuzz to be further amplified. One wants to set the input level of the microphone high but not so high as to cause clipping.
As a tip so that one won't get that low-frequency noise due to gusts of air via vocalization (such as "popping P's"): attach some sort of batting material on the front of the microphone. If the microphone is one of the small computer ones, a cotton ball should be big enough to fit over the front (one can even shape the cotton ball, so that it fits down a little ways on the front of the microphone's shaft).
To make it look nicer, you can then wrap that with some highly breathable, light frabric and tie it off; then cut off any excess material.
What doing this will achieve is to prevent the gush of wind (due to vocalization) from hitting the microphone's diaphragm, and hence preventing it from bottoming out. Yet the airy batting material (such as cotton batting) will still allow the sound waves to get through just fine.
Experiment around with different configurations to find out what works best on your microphone.
