Sound Design Stack Exchange
Sound Design Stack Exchange

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1500 questions
22
votes
3 answers

Quiet Ambience Recording Tips

So I got a chance to visit an old church today which is over 300,000 square feet total with my recording equipment to poke around and see what I could find to record. Not a soul was on the premises except myself, so I decided to record some…
Utopia
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22
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3 answers

What is a balanced input / output?

What does it mean when an input or output is balanced?
Willbill
22
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3 answers

How to recover audio from an incomplete or corrupted AAC/m4a file

I recorded an 85-minute AAC/m4a file using Notability on my iPad. This app has always worked well before but for some reason there was a problem this time. The relevant file shows up as having 21MB (about the right size) and appeared to be recording…
Jim
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22
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47 answers

You might be a sound recordist if

You are recording yourself typing right now. You've just destroyed an expensive piece of equipment during a session, but you're OK with that because it sounded cool. You accidentally dropped a bottle of something and it broke, smashing everywhere,…
Colin Hart
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21
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14 answers

Audio Mythbusting

Since we're all about information sharing on this site, I thought it might be interesting to have a thread to collect debunked audio myths. Who knows what wacky claims you've heard in the past, or what genuinely relevant information you may have…
Shaun Farley
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21
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9 answers

Best approaches to panning backgrounds when camera angles change

Hi folks, I was working on a short film the other day and came upon a re-occuring situation that I wanted to get your take on. One of the scenes takes place in a kitchen. It was raining outside and you could see rain and water dripping off the…
Brendan
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21
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2 answers

What is side chain compression?

I've heard mention of side chaining or side chain compression in reference to electronic music (specifically Daft Punk). What is it?
Dan McClain
21
votes
4 answers

Stereo and mono cables and jacks? What happens when you cross them?

I'm trying to get an understand of the effects of stereo and mono cables and jacks. This is complex because my mixer has both only mono jacks, and my devices -- most of them -- only have stereo outputs. Further, my microphone in on my computer is a…
Evan Carroll
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6 answers

How do you use gain effectively?

Have read a few descriptions and understand basically what gain is, but I am quite the novice with audio work. I've never heard gain or it's usage described by those who are really familiar with it and I don't really get the difference between gain…
That Realtor Programmer Guy
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20
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47 answers

Best use of Silence in a film?

In my opinion some of the best film sound is not loud or overt, and I've used silence many times in film soundtracks myself but I am interested to know what your favorite use of silence or near-silence is in a film?
user49
20
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3 answers

What is/are the first effect(s) I should put on raw vocal recordings?

The main problem my finished tracks have is a poor quality vocal sound. I generally try to apply a dynamic range compression filter first and then add some reverb/chorus as appropriate but I can never get results that are good enough. What do you…
jeebs
20
votes
6 answers

Are there free records of separate piano notes in .wav files for instance?

I'm trying to find some piano sound bank -for my childish experiments with sound - the most desired form is of course a number of .wav files, each one corresponding to a piano key - being a record of a real piano key sound. Is it possible to find…
Art
20
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13 answers

How to capture very low volume sounds?

A while ago I was surfing some nerdy geeky website and found that a company had designed that mic that could capture really low volume sounds like the sound emitted by the filaments of a light bulb for example. I cannot find that page again but how…
Funk patrol
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7 answers

Grabbing hold of one's career arc

After more than 11 years of doing this all day every day I've learned just how broad and deep the field of audio truly is. The more I do this the more I realize how much I still have yet to learn. The question now is where to focus. I was…
Rene
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Washington Post covers sound design in film:

There's a nice piece by Ann Hornaday with a video in today's Washington Post here.
Justin P
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