OT: Audacity noise removal question

[Joerg]

Hopefully the filtered audio was saved in wave format. I had mentioned
that when you started this journey. If you saved it as mp3, then you
doubly compressed it, hence the dreaded cascade of codecs.


Memory is so cheap these days, I do all recording in wave. You want to
compress only once.

Yep, I store in Audacity format and at the end WAV.

 

[Joerg]

You already wasted one CD.

I think I'll live.

Having a CD-RW around pays itself back many times,
I use them, I make mistakes.
Especially with DVD menus and buttons...
Try before you have many coasters.

Easy to say if you leave in or near an urban environment. Out here it's
not a problem to buy horse feed of glow plugs for the tractor. But
CD-RW, wots dat?

Maybe I find a CD-RW somewhere. But not today.

 

[Joerg]

Suggest to read the whole thread before making such unqualified remarks.

He has no control over what the disks will be played on. Maybe ten year
old car players, or worse.

Nothing to do with whatever Joerg himself uses.

They are for members of his Church, which you should know already, if
you've been following the thread.

Actually they are people in the midwest who could not fly in for the
service, due to advanced age and subsequent health issues. And right, I
do not know what players they have, I don't even know them personally.
The widow knows them.

 

[Joerg]

Not that close, but we have mail order.
Maybe one day over there too?

I only do that when I need a lot or something is super urgent. In this
case it's not very urgent and I'll just get some the next time I drive
into Placerville. Which will be this week. Shipping isn't much faster
unless you pay a lot.

Typically you can only get bulk packs which in the case of CDs I'll
never use up. So wasting one or even two isn't going to break the bank.

Today is Sunday here.

I'll be ... it's Sunday here, too

[...]

 

[Joerg]

There is s small issue with CDs and DVDs here.
The powers of government in the Netherlands have decided to add some extra to the price
of each CD or DVD, and supposedly that extra goes to the artist club.
I have never got anything for the copies I make of my own work from
that club, and still have to pay the surcharge (everyone does).
So I used to get the DVDs from Germany via mail order, where there was no such surcharge,
but then last year somebody apparently did threaten to close the German shop,
as probably half of the Netherlands started buying there,
It is not much if you only buy one DVD, but a lot of you buy in hundreds.

I believe Germany collects such "pirate copy anticipation tax" when you
buy the CD or DVD recorder. It is IMHO disgusting, to automatically
assume people will do illegal copying and just charge everyone. I have
never pirated a single song and would be very miffed if charged such taxes.

I have heard imports from mars are still possible.

It is a bit like 'luister en kijkgeld' was, I never payed anything in my
life, as I obviously had no teafee and radio...
Then finally they just did away with it and payed the National broadcasters
(mind control network) from the taxes,
So now I have a teafee and radio.

I remember in the last year, before 'luister en kijkgeld' was abandoned,
they got really heavy with threads and folders etc.
maybe one day they will stop that crap with DVDs too.
Germany still has it.... Can get you in trouble if you do not pay.

Hey I also ordered some nice UJTs 2N2646... ebay.

Maybe when I retired I can play with old stuff again as well. But most
likely not because then I'll expand my non-EE assignments in life.

 

[josephkk]

Hey even Pulse Audio works these days on opensuse.

I never ran Debian much. I installed it once, had trouble with RAID, and
never went back. Every time I build a new PC, I run through the major
distros to get a sense of what is happening, but then just install
opensuse. Opensuse works right out of the box, so to speak. It used to
be Torvald's distro of choice until his meltdown a few weeks ago,
equating opensuse to the Taliban.

Just the same soupy, the things Linus is complaining about are valid
complaints. And they are dumb security policy decisions.

?-)

 

[josephkk]

I finally ran into a computer problem that has no easy fix. I need to
install Server 2000 on a server with no CD or DVD drive, and no port for
one. It has PXE, but 'Microslosh & Deli' have dropped all the
information. It is a one RU server with four, 40 GB drives I have a
legal copy of Backoffice server 2000, but you can't install the Remote
Install Server on one computer, and use the same license to actually
install the software. Who knew? That breaks my 30 year track record on
computer repairs. The server is a spotless Dell 725N rack mount server,
with a COA for server 2000. The other server is a Dell 2650. It has a
CD & a floppy drive, but it is going somewhere else with Ubuntu & Apache
server installed.

That's a fubar licence problem rather than a fubar hardware problem then,
ain't it.

?-)

 

[josephkk]

Before it was Audacity, it was called "Cool Edit Pro" - unless I'm
mistaken. (?)

Never was. Audacity came from the *nix world, CEP never was there.

 

[miso]

The idea is if the program crashes, the hacker is left in an account
that doesn't have root permission. Beyond that, there probably isn't
much benefit to not running as root.

Opensuse doesn't exactly have SElinux running by default. They use
appguard. I don't know the fine details on this, but my understanding is
appguard is not as good as full blown SElinux, but considered a
compromise. SELinux is so annoying that nobody uses it.

 

[miso]

It could be a matter of where you live. I get CD-Rs for about a dime. I
don't mind wasting a few. DVDs are about a quarter.

In the dark ages when the media was expensive, I messed with
rewriteable, Now I make frisbees if need be.

The paper sleeves are the real ripoff!

 

[miso]

my xpequ has an AGC option.

But simpler, 'sox' has the 'norm' option that normalises a wave file for amplitude.

To quote:
--norm Automatically invoke the gain effect to guard against clipping and to normalise the audio. E.g.
sox --norm infile -b 16 outfile rate 44100 dither -s
is shorthand for
sox infile -b 16 outfile gain -h rate 44100 gain -nh dither -s
See also -V, -G, and the gain effect.

Please read
man sox
and look for gain, typing
/gain
will highlight that word everywhere in the manual

It may teach you some things about audio too.

Normalizing is processing 101. The problem with using sox for this is
you don't get to examine where in the stream the peak occurred. If some
clown bumped the microphone, it is better to go to the spot and
attenuate the bump rather than to let that bump set the audio level for
the entire recording.

The other thing is audacity is at this point a standard. You have a
problem, you can find plenty of people writing about the same issue.

 

[miso]

dd comes in handy for some linux drivers that need to upload firmware to
the device. Really a pain in the ass. You need to get the windows driver
and use dd to pull out the firmware. I've seen this on some USB
satellite receivers.

 

[miso]

I use Mapivi. Written in perl. Very comprehensive.

Looks useful for many things, but it doesn't see my raw files. However,
being able to crop a jpg in a lossless manner is very useful.

 

[WhySoSerious?]

He has no control over what the disks will be played on. Maybe ten year
old car players, or worse.

Nothing to do with whatever Joerg himself uses.

They are for members of his Church, which you should know already, if
you've been following the thread.

I have been laughing at the thread.

 

[WoolyBully]

computah power

You are so fucking retarded!

 

[Joerg]

It is very strange to hear such contradictory remarks from someone
who once claimed to want to save on every part.
Think about it.
Or maybe you do not know what you can do with an UJT.

Of course I know, those things were in a lot of worthless hobby
electronics instructions when I was a kid. The authors were either
ignorant or simply didn't know that those UJTs were either unobtanium or
very expensive.

You have probably never designed anything for true mass production. I
frequently do. Go on a distributor web site and check. You will find a
few left-over UJTs. However, they cost 10c or more which, in a consumer
app, is a ton of money. Secondly, they are only available in TO
packages. That was ok in the 70's but since the 80's, not anymore.

Hint: What isn't available in large quantities from major distributors
is usually no good for a successful design.

 

[Joerg]

Never had a problem buying them.
I think you were ignorant of Dutch electronics shops.

We did regular "electronics pilgrimage" trips to the Netherlands. But
most stores there dealt more in military surplus. I was intimately
familiar with the offerings of mail order shops and no affordable UJTs
there. A transistor that cost several Guilders was not something I
considered affordable.

Philips used programmable UJTs in their ultrasound remote controls,
a mass product at that time.

Is there a schematic on the web? Ultrasound remotes didn't have much of
a production life because they did not work very well. Unfortunately
they then went IR instead of RF.

Sorry, makes no sense to me.

I am not too surprised

It means that a part is not very mainstream so there is a serious risk
of obsolescence. This is almost the worst that can happen on a design
that must remain in mass production for a decade or more. Some of my
designs are well past their 15th year in production.

 

[Joerg]

Jan Panteltje wrote:

[...]

And I have to add, that if 'electuur' (elektor) published a hobby project,
then all the electronic parts shops would stock up on the parts.
Some even advertised in the same magazine.
Radio Bulletin, Elektuur, radio Electronica, all of that time.
Elektuur then even had kits and ready made PCBs of very high quality.
One supported the other.
Yes parts cost money, hey, but not really that much to stop
people building things.

Still, I have never seen an affordable UJT back then. But the world did
not really need them anyhow, it was more "technology looking for a
home". And now they all but vanished, which isn't a surprise to me.

Since I also do EMC consulting I get to see lots of electronics,
inlcuding older stuff that suddenly has to be redesigned to pass a
higher emissions class or must be ruggedized for susceptibility. Never
seen UJTs in any of this.

Were very good times for electronic tinkerers, and actually still are.

What was Elektuur named before it was named 'Elektuur'?
Cannot seem to remember.

Don't know, it was Elektor in Germany. I never had a high regard for
that magazine. A lot of errors in schematics, bugs that I discovered
even as a teenager. Sometimes I had the impression there were chunks in
there just to fill the magazine.

My source of information was usually from the US, for example ARRL
publications. Also sometimes the German and Dutch ham radio magazines.

Go further back, remember Dr Blan?

No. But I do have the Vonkenboer

 

[Fred Abse]

Easy to say if you leave in or near an urban environment. Out here it's
not a problem to buy horse feed of glow plugs for the tractor. But CD-RW,
wots dat?

Cow Dung Recycling Widget?

 

[Fred Abse]

Or maybe you do not know what you can do with an UJT.

Having once spent (wasted?) three days troubleshooting an intermittent
problem on the controller for an ink drying oven on a massive web offset
printing machine, that had already fazed several people, eventually
tracing it to a flaky UJT, I know what I'd *like* to do with the damn
things.

Still, it was a long time ago, and a long way away.