[Osdc-edu-authors] PROGRESS!

[Matthew Jadud]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 17:37, Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
> So I'm presuming that you are both busy and not secretly an audio
> engineer fanatic. (That's not true for me, I REALLY want to learn

Actually, I am a fanatic. In grad school, I bought all the equipment
to do pro stereo recordings of recitals, and could record direct to
hard disk as well as to minidisc simultaneously (for backup). That
said...

> What if we have some budget to pay a professional to do post
> production on your recordings? This would be cleaning up, any edits to

I think every bit needs:

1. A trim to start and end.
2. Normalization.
3. Possible noise reduction, but... see below.

The conditions under which I recorded were varied. It is the first
time I took the audio interview rig on the road, so investing any
significant dollars in cleanup would probably be silly.

The worst conditions were an interview in a little coffee area with
music in the background. Because the lapel mics were highly
directional, you can still hear the speakers clearly, and the
complexity of the environment is such that you can't do a simple
filter to "get rid of" the background noise. The best was probably the
interview with Grant, which I spot-checked on site, and it sounded
beautiful. That's because we were in a massive hall away from any
sources of noise. (Actually, the BlueJ interview was good, too.)

> make things smooth, providing a common intro and outro, and making the
> audio levels for all that to not jar the listener. (Probably more than

I was going to grab some CC-licensed audio from, possibly, Magnatune
or similar for an intro-outro.

> Mel - if you think this is something we might be able to do, I could
> intermediate with Matt and Dan to work out the details so we could get
> a bid (thus actually knowing if we *can* do it.)

I've got around 6-7 interviews that need editing, and I have to work
up the intro/outtro, which is mostly a question of "what do we want to
say." I already introduce myself and the guest in each recording, so
it really is just wrapping it up with an "opensource.com podcast" kind
of thing. If we want it to be more general than just these (which is
potentially putting the cart before the horse), I'm mostly looking for
someone who would be willing to trim up the MP3s in Audacity, make
sure they're reasonably normalized (and, if minimal audio filtering
helps, try it), and kick them back.

However, if you think we need to do something bigger/more general for
future use/etc., that's possible. Otherwise, we wait until early May
when my schedule opens up again. Then, we can run them on a bi-weekly
schedule or similar. (Transcription would be something that would be
nice, but would take time/cost, and would be the most useful thing.
That would take me a long time, and is something that is better
crowdsourced. The edit/intro stuff will actually go quickly once I
stop writing papers and teaching for the semester.)

Cheers,
Matt