My first attempt at taping and I screwed up...help!

[paulisme]

Okay, so I took my wife to the Taylor Hicks concert tonight in Charleston, SC, and decided I would make my first foray into taping. I bought a Griffin iTalk voice recorder attachment for my iPod, and after trying it out at home, I found that it actually made a pretty decent recording as long as the automatic gain setting was turned off. Well, I didn't realize that the iTalk didn't keep its settings after being disconnected from the iPod, so, with automatic gain being the default setting, I ended up recording the whole show with auto-gain on. What a disaster. The volume is up and down constantly as the unit switches from low to high gain, with pops in between the switches. My wife is so pissed at me. Is there any way possible I could salvage this recording? I'm including an MP3 sample so you can hear the problems I'm talking about.

[diggrd]

Okay, so I took my wife to the Taylor Hicks concert tonight in Charleston, SC, and decided I would make my first foray into taping. I bought a Griffin iTalk voice recorder attachment for my iPod, and after trying it out at home, I found that it actually made a pretty decent recording as long as the automatic gain setting was turned off. Well, I didn't realize that the iTalk didn't keep its settings after being disconnected from the iPod, so, with automatic gain being the default setting, I ended up recording the whole show with auto-gain on. What a disaster. The volume is up and down constantly as the unit switches from low to high gain, with pops in between the switches. My wife is so pissed at me. Is there any way possible I could salvage this recording? I'm including an MP3 sample so you can hear the problems I'm talking about.
Here's a sample of a quick attempt to fix this by using hard limiting in Audition with a setting of -12dB limit and boost of 9dB. the two channels may require independent values as they are quite a bit different in volume.

The Hard Limiting effect drastically attenuates audio that rises above a defined threshold, leaving audio below the threshold unaffected. This effect is particularly useful for increasing perceived volume because you can amplify audio beyond the digital maximum, 0 dbFS, and you can lower areas that would otherwise be clipped. For example, when you convert from 32-bit to 16-bit audio, particularly loud 32-bit passages can cause 16-bit clipping. To prevent clipping, you can either use the Normalize effect to reduce the amplitude of the entire file (lowering perceived volume), or you can use the Hard Limiting effect to reduce amplitude only for loud passages (increasing perceived volume).

[paulisme]

diggrd, it's difficult to hear any improvements in your version because of the MP3 compression, but I'm trying to re-create the same effect you explained with Audacity. Audacity has no boost option in its hard limiter, though; do you have any suggestions of settings I could use in Audacity to get similar results?

I've found that I can remove most of the clicks in a program called ClickRepair, so my main objective is to get rid of the volume spikes at this point.

[Five]

in audition you can use effects>amplitude>hardlimiting and there is boost available there.

for click repairs in audition you can use effects>noise reduction>click/pop eliminator>*fix single click now*

best to hit the clicks one at a time, normally 30-100 samples processed at once is sufficient to fix any click. don't run the wholesale auto click fix as it will still miss many of them and smooth out a lot of stuff that should be left alone.

autogain sounds really awful, I haven't found any way to reverse it. You could also try an expander set to the exact opposite of the original compression which is decent in theory but pretty much impossible in practice.

I've also used the iTalk and found the "low gain" setting is still a little too loud for concert recording resulting in a fair bit of clipping but not as bad as autogain, of course. There's also an external input where a headphone volume control can be inserted for attenuation, but it is mono (!! :( ).

[diggrd]

Gotta agree that this is more work than it is worth other than the value of marital harmony. :)
I would think at best you could make something barely listenable from this and you would have better luck tracking down some other recording of this show.
this one is up on dad
Taylor Hicks
April 24th, 2007.
Lifestyle Communities Pavilion - Columbus, OH.
01. Intro > Gonna Move
02. Give Me Tonight
03. Dream Myself Awake
04. Hell Of A Day *
05. Compared To What
06. Wherever I Lay My Hat **
07. My Friend
08. The Deal
09. Hold On To Your Love #
10. Just To Feel That Way
11. Medicated Goo ##
12. Heaven Knows ^
13. The Maze ^^
14. The Right Place
15. Runaround %
16. ~ Encore ~
17. Naked In The Jungle %%