On Friday 05 March 2010 16:23:22 Indranil Das Gupta wrote: > Hi all, > > Last night Dr Mandar Mitra (of ISI Kolkata and IOTA board member) - > an old friend and long-time FOSS user, sent out a rebuttal to the > claims of unfitness of Audacity as a audio rec / edit tool. In his > email he spoke about how he would do his recordings and what has > been his experience so far with it [1]. He also invited Shri > Anindya Banerji, the multimedia expert in question to further > clarify his comments and remarks about Audacity vs Audition. > > A while back Sri Banerji, responded back with his clarifications. > I've put up his response on my blog - > http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/155 > > Mr. Banerji's response makes for rather interesting reading and I > would request input from all, but particularly (based on my limited > knowledge) from Dr Nagarjuna, Niyam Bhushan, jtd and others who > have come in with specific inputs so far on this topic. > > thanks > > references : > > [1] http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/154
Ok. From the response one can conclude two points 1) Closed formats 2) The consultant is sticking to a single tool when he has undefined jobs. 3) The consultant does not understand the real issues of audio processing using computers. 4) This requirement is not for professional high definition audio recording, - the type you would have in a SciFi movie or a modern heavy metal band - but the usual government ration bhashan editing. 1) Dont use closed formats EVER, irrespective of any arguments. If you need quality use analog tapes (and incur the cost of maintaining those - remember it is very expensive). For archiving use raw 196Khz sampled data. For other archiving purposes use flac. For consumption uses ogg. All parameters of an ogg encoding can be customised. So depending on the audience (mp3 player / FM radio / Internet radio / hifi etc ) you can set the sampling rate, sample size etc providing suitable compromise on quality v/s size/bw. Most important - use of closed formats will make everyone incur a penalty while playing back. If the government wanted to stream a closed format, they will directly be paying a fat sum for closed streaming codecs, instead of using VLC / Apache+ icecast/ shoutcast / some taken-for-granted FLOSS tool chain. 2) When you have undefined batch jobs like converting multiple input formats / quality to a single predefined format, use sox (and ffmpeg for video or audio container). One has to spend a few hours understanding the workings o these tools. Even if one builds a gui, this requirement would not go away - undefined problems have a way of styming everything except the CLI. 3 and 4) One does not record sitting on your desk. You require an anechoic (or a room with a well defined acoustic print) and fixed high performance microphones. And you would have a table load of equipment to check dynamic range, TIM distrotion, frequency response etc. Also clock jitter and drift shows up as distortion. Clock jitter is never checked in a pc and quite a bit of drift occurs as the ambient and chip temperature changes. Thus pcs will have markedly different distortion depending on the difference in the source data clocks and the sound card clock. The older sound cards used an external crystal (which was good). The new onboard sound uses the motherboards 14.318 xtal and a pll to generate the 24.576 Mhz clock. They are hence exposed to the jitter of he 14.318 Mhz signal (besides their own). Hence you use a PRO quality sound card like the delta 1010 with "word clock I/O for sample accurate device synchronization" or an external DSP box. Finally live recording / dubbing of audio at a desk is used mainly for porn, shaadi-happybirthday scenes. "quickly fixing recording errors by punching in corrections on-the-fly " a must for my kids first classic rendering of "Three little kittens". As usual while the software requirements are PRO everything else in the tool chain is distinctly amateur - or to give the benefit of doubt completely unspecified. IMO Dont waste money on studying the workflow and quality and performance. Any old software can be used with a little bit of training. -- Rgds JTD _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
