AV News 174 - November 2008
Top Ten Tips (Continued)
Howard Gregory
Get some decent audio software.
When starting in AV, the most important thing is to get started – "Just do it" whilst
you explore the process of creating a structured sequence. Refining technical
quality comes later. When you reach this stage, ask yourself two questions:
- what image-manipulation package am I using?
- why did I choose this package?
Then ask the same questions of your audio manipulation package.
It's no secret that I'm not keen on Audacity – not because I haven't tried it,
I have - but because it has some technical and operational drawbacks.
When you click your mouse, several things may happen – some obvious,
some hidden, some appropriate to what you are trying to achieve, some not
so appropriate, some good, some bad. With Audition you can rest assured
that the "hidden" things won't be doing any harm, with Audacity you can't, e.g.
see AVN Issue 169 "An Audacity Problem" which I wrote after seeing a
technical report on one of the damaging side-effects of Audacity.
To put it another way, let's assume that you are trying to achieve the best
technical quality you can (within reason.) With Audition you only need to
know what you are doing. With Audacity you need to know what you are
doing, what Audacity will be trying to do at each mouse click, whether that
might be detrimental, and, if so, know a "way round" the problem – another
less damaging way to achieve your aim.
In short, to get the best out of Audacity, you need to know far more about
audio and how computers deal with it than you do to get the same results out
of Audition. We're still using Audition 1.0!
(Howard has sent a further lengthy article detailing perceived 'problems'
with Audacity and we plan to publish that with some tips on how to avoid
them, along with some of the problems that we have discovered with Audition
in the next Issue of AV News. Eds)
Upgrade your soundcard (?)
I’ve deliberately put this la