Editing and cataloging Sound

The biggest task in collecting sounds is editing and organizing them. This job starts while doing the recording itself. Over the years I have found that it is very important to take notes while recording and to put a voice slate on the recording. I can't even count the number of times that I was sure I would remember the specifics of what I was recording, only to have to put off the edit for several months-- then when I finally do get back to the recording, I can't remember what it was or where it was, or what I was intending to capture. Since I record a lot of ambiances, I usually mention the date, time of day, location, and what I am recording. It's not always possible to slate at the beginning of a recording, so now I try to at least give a description at the end of the recording.

Once I have made the recordings, I load them into my computer to edit them into usable pieces. I used to do this on my PC using Sound Forge 5.0, but it renders really slowly and I don't like the quality of the processing. Now I usually edit on my Mac which is running Protocols TDM 5.3. I don't usually do very much severe manipulation, unless I am trying to Design Training a particular sound. If I had recorded in mid-side stereo, I will decode it to a standard stereo file and adjust the width to what sounds natural to me. I will usually adjust the level so that is sounds natural, or maybe a little louder than natural, with my speakers calibrated to 79dB spl, which is the level at which I mix. I realize that this often leaves a lot of wasted headroom, but it saves me the trouble of having to reduce the gain significantly when I am mixing. I also do some Qing to my sounds, particularly in the low end. The lower frequency components of sounds tend to build up upon one another, making a mix booms or muddy and eating up its headroom in the process. I typically use a high pass filter to remove some rumble. I usually start at a very low frequency and then move the filter up until I feel like I'm loosing something important in the character of the sound, then I'll back it back down a bit and compare between the original and the filtered version until I think I've done just enough.

I will also edit the sound for content, finding the longest usable portions and sometimes editing several together. I remove mic noises, wind noises, perhaps an airplane or a car passing-- anything that I don't really want in the recording. For ambiances, I like to get 3 minutes of usable sound. Sometimes I will record for 10 minutes to get those 3 usable minutes, sometimes I might only get a minute or 30 seconds of usable Sound. Sometime I don't get anything usable at all. Occasionally, I get something completely unexpected. On July fourth, I went out to record people lighting off fireworks. I was recording in one location that was giving me bad results for fireworks, but then a guy rode by on the squeakiest bicycle I had ever heard. I'm not sure what I'll use that sound for yet, but when I need it, I know I'll have it.

Once I've edited and processed the sound, I will usually create a Broadcast Wave file. If I had recorded on the Deva, I will keep this as a 24 bit 48 kHz wave file, If the source was a minidisc, I will create a 16bit 48kHz wave file. The file is named as descriptively as possible given the number of characters available. It then gets placed in a folder in my library of Free Sounds. My library's hierarchy is probably not ideal, but it works for me. I have an outer layer of folder such as Outdoor Ambiances, Indoor Ambiances, Fire, Water, People, Mechanical, Electronic, Transportation, etc. Within each of those folders I have sub folders which divide the sounds into further categories. For example: Transportation has the subfolders Trains, Cars, Motorcycles, Bicycles, Boats and Planes. Planes has a further set of sub folders; Jets and Propellers. I also add all of my sounds to I-Tunes, so that I can quickly search and listen to the files. Unfortunately I Tunes doesn't recognize 24bit files, so I will probably purchase Sound Miner sometime soon, at which time I will begin the arduous task of describing all of my sounds into the metadata fields of the broadcast wave files.