

Keep an eye on your levels while recording - you may have to adjust them to maintain proper headroom.

In a digital field recorder, for example, targeting -15dBFS will likely give enough headroom for a typical conversation in a quiet room. Make allowance for the louder peaks of laughter/excitement/scene sounds that occur between the consistent level of conversation and 0dBFS (known as headroom). Set your recording levels conservatively. Think you can recognize the sound of distortion? Take our audio quiz and find out! This issue often happens during recording (although it can happen during mixing, too). You may have set the levels too high or not accounted for a sudden increase in volume. The audio may sound like it is “breaking up.”ĭistortion occurs when audio levels exceed the capabilities of your equipment or software. You might describe distortion and clipping as sounding crackly, fuzzy, overloading or staticky. These issues occur while putting the finishes touches on a piece.īefore you make any decisions about audio based on this guide, have a conversation with your management, production and engineering teams to learn the preferred approach in your organization.Ī field recorder with levels peaking at 0dBFS and the “OVER” light on. These issues pop up at your desk, cutting the piece together. These issues occur while recording in a studio or gathering audio in the field. The guide has three main sections: Recording problems
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If you do anything with this guide, learn how to recognize and prevent each problem. It can be difficult and time-consuming to fix problematic audio once it’s recorded. The term “garbage in, garbage out” is common in the audio world because it’s true. Preventing audio problems is one of the keys to ensuring quality productions. Watch this recorded webinar about common audio problems. NPR Training’s Rob Byers and two NPR audio engineers took audio production questions during a reddit AMA. Before you start here, learn how to identify bad audio and take our audio problems quiz.

It’s a great reference guide for anyone who works with audio, from new producers to seasoned veterans. This post will help you identify problematic audio, prevent the most common problems and recognize when it’s time to call for help. We need to be able to spot problems and identify them to before they impact quality or snowball into larger technical problems. Ear training, the practice of learning how to recognize certain sounds, is a must for audio producers.
