I sing tenor, and I’m looking for satisfying projects.

I am trained in bel canto, willing to make weird noises, poking into throat singing.

I made a track on a whim yesterday, and someone was silly and/or kind enough to encourage me to post it. It can be found at http://66.92.135.14/Clients... The a cappella vocal tracks are licensed by me under CC attribution sharealike. The text is derived from the old “Taily-Po” folk story, as presented in Uncle Remus, which I believe is public domain now. I mixed with an instrumental by Angus Skrim, which they posted on their Web site http://angusskrim.com/ but without an explicit license.

If this track can be helpful, I’d like to provide it. But I’m not sure how to proceed. The 24-bit raw track seems to be the most valuable, but even with FLAC compression it’s more than double the 10 MB limit. I could split, trim silence, … ?

I’m also very willing to do other stuff as useful. This was a one-take, since I had no particular idea of what it should be. I can polish things up quite a bit. You can find somewhat better polish, but out of date, at http://people.cs.uchicago.e... The texts to “Nina” and “Upon Woman’s Love” are public domain, but “Countin’ Flowers on the Wall” is still under copyright. Performances are all CC attribution sharealike. I can dig out the short sample from which I looped the “Woman’s Love.”

I do my recording on an Edirol R09 at 44.1 KHz 24 bit samples. I have a cheap mono condenser mic, and a cheap dynamic, but so far I’ve preferred the built-in stereo.

So, if anyone cares to suggest how I can be most useful, please fire away. Sometime soon, I’ll pick some way to post the “Taily-Po,” or maybe the short sample from “Upon Woman’s Love,” as an experiment, anyway.

Mike O’Donnell
http://people.cs.uchicago.e...

Convert that sucker to 16-bit. 24 is fine but it’s debatable whether the human ear can perceive the difference and the loss of quality should be negligible if it’s there at all.

Trimming silence won’t help you as FLAC uses less space for less volume and at 0db it uses nothing.

16 bit vs 24 bit has very little to do with the end product since that tends to be in 16bit - even for CD’s.

Recording at 24 bit makes a lot of sense because it gives you a much more forgivenesses for recording at low volumes, because of the extra accuracy of the numbers.

So if your track is at a good volume, 16 bit is quite fine. However if your track is recorded at a low voulme, 16 bit can loose some accuracy.

During mixing 24 bit tends to give better results, too.

Both have to do with rounding. Using 24 bit samples is like having more decimal places compared to 16 bit. At high numbers more decimal places don’t really mean much. But when the numbers are small, more decimal places become more meaningful.

Look the effect of rounding at a low numbers at numbers between 10 and 20, a decimal place means a lot: e.g. 9.6 vs. 10.4 rounded are both 10, but they really are 8% apart. At high numbers between 1000 and 2000 an extra decimal place doesn’t mean much. 1499.6 and 1500.4 are much less than 0.1 % apart.

Mixing (including effects processing) is like doing math with several numbers . It is better to do the rounding AFTER dong the math, rather than before.

To illustrate with a simple example: compare the effects of rounding 1.1 plus 2.2 plus 3.3 by rounding before (1 plus 2 plus 3 = 6) vs. after (1.1 plus 2.2 plus 3.3 = 7).

Good volume tracks at 16 bit are fine. Low volume tracks at 16 bit can be troublesome to work with.