For the first time the quality was just too bad to listen to

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 11:49 pm

I know there are all kinds of probelms in doing a live show with guests over the phone or broadband so I'm not razzing on you. I tried to listen but just couldn't this time... a little to painful. Better luck next week.

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 4:45 am

It was in the beginning but it got better as soon as Dan figured out what the problem was. Also it didn't help that none of us were at Dan's. We apologize to everyone who put up with it last night.

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 6:06 am

Patrick wrote:It was in the beginning but it got better as soon as Dan figured out what the problem was. Also it didn't help that none of us were at Dan's. We apologize to everyone who put up with it last night.

I hate to say it, but it really does sound better when only the guests are remote. I can't imagine how hard it is to do a weekly show. I enjoy listening, but it takes real dedication for everyone of you even when you are remote to set aside every Wednesday night. I'm interested to see how things go when Dann moves. His place has kind of been the glue that keeps you guys hooked together. Anyway, good luck on up coming shows and continuing the show after Dann's move. I think podcasting would be fun, but I would never be able to promise getting out a show once a week. I just couldn't put it that high on the priority list with family and job needing my schedule very flexable.

So way to go guys, you do a great job.

mowestusa

Post by **Patrick** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:35 am

I have an M-audio Delta 44 card and want to give jokosher a good run through. I know it's currently beta software so I know there will be some issues. If it works out and the quality is good we might use it to record the show. I'll be setting it up this weekend. Unfortunately Allan's Euro-rack mixer doesn't have individual line-outs for each track. It looks like my old tascam does. I have to pick-up some cables and set it all up. The biggest challenge when having multiple people on voip is that their volumes are all over the place and it's difficult to get a good mix. Last night Linc said I sounded extremely loud to him while Dan said it was ok. Going forward we probably shouldn't have more than 2 people on via voip at any one time.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:59 am

Patrick wrote:I have an M-audio Delta 44 card and want to give jokosher a good run through. I know it's currently beta software so I know there will be some issues. If it works out and the quality is good we might use it to record the show.

At the moment, Jokosher doesn't fully support the M-audio card. It will work, but multiple inputs aren't working.

One of the programmers is working on hardware support for this specific card, though (I think Jono has this card). It may be a Gstreamer issue as well as a Jokosher issue. The Jokosher team works pretty closely with the Gstreamer people, though, and a lot of improvement is happening in both projects because of it.

Jokosher 0.2 is coming in November, and should be real close to usable. If you want to try it now, use the SVN version, and feel free to file bugs and complain in the forums (http://www.jokosher.org/forums).

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 3:33 pm

Patrick wrote:I have an M-audio Delta 44 card and want to give jokosher a good run through. I know it's currently beta software so I know there will be some issues. If it works out and the quality is good we might use it to record the show. I'll be setting it up this weekend. Unfortunately Allan's Euro-rack mixer doesn't have individual line-outs for each track. It looks like my old tascam does. I have to pick-up some cables and set it all up.

Patrick,
I'm really interested in your work in this area. I have a digital studio set up that is using Windows and a older version of Cool Edit. I have exactly that same card M-Audio Delta 44 and a Euro-rack mixer and compressor too like you guys. If I can move it over to a Linux box that would be great. Or at the very least I would like to have it dual booting, with both sides working well, so I can move those who help me to an all Linux studio.

As far as using the multiple inputs on the M-Audio card, I don't use them myself, and I would think that for a live show like yours it wouldn't be very helpful either. To solve the audio levels I would suggest having a separate inputs for each of the hosts (4), separate computer for Skype (1), separate computer for Asterisk (1). I would imagine that this is similar to your set up right now. If you use the 4 inputs then you would have to do multitrack recording, which would also mean that I don't think you could use the compressor on the whole show, you would have to use the compressor on only 2 of the inputs. I would think that if your Euro-rack has 6 inputs then you could get the mix just right for each of the hosts, the skype, and Asterisk guests. Since you are recording in mono then you could send the Left channel to one computer to record, and second the Right channel to another computer to record a backup. If you have the mix levels just right in the mixer than you can send the whole mix to the compressor which will eliminate the clipping from all of the inputs at once. You could also use the gate on the compressor to shut out the fan noise during silent breaks in the conversation. Then from the compressor you can go into two recording computers from the Left and Right channels.

For a live show that seems like it would be less prone to troubles, then trying to make sure that multitrack recording is always working. You would also have one spot where you would up or bring down the volumes, leaving the software mixers alone on every one of the computers. Just some thoughts, but I would love to hear other ideas as well, since I spend part of every week working in my non professional recording studio.

You could have one host monitor the "mixer" mix, and then have another host with headphones in the recording computer monitoring the computer recording of the podcast.

mowestusa

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 10:00 am

I hate to say it, but I haven't been able to listen to a show since LWO. I just can't deal with the sound/lag issues.

granduke · Post by **granduke** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 10:20 am

I was unable to get far listening to the show live. This morning I started listening to the downloaded audio and the show was quite good. Once Dann solved the bandwidth issue the interview turned out interesting. One of my recent favorites.

granduke

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 10:49 am

Patrick wrote:It was in the beginning but it got better as soon as Dan figured out what the problem was. Also it didn't help that none of us were at Dan's. We apologize to everyone who put up with it last night.

After listening to the show I'd say some of the problems were cleared up, but there were still level problems. It sounded like you and Dann were both way too hot coming into the board and distorting. With the mixer you have, though, I imagine it probably doesn't have a peak meter to set microphone trim right.

There was also someone playing with their mic stand (squeak squeak squeak) the whole show, which was a little annoying.

The sound problems didn't make it hard to listen, but it was painful hearing Dann working so hard and being frustrated that he couldn't fix the problems. It's all part of live broadcasting, I guess.

k9wkj · Post by **k9wkj** » Sun Aug 06, 2006 8:32 am

i have solved most of the problems for our show
by using 1 box with seperate sound cards for different functions
at that point isolstion is absolute
all of the sound sources go to the mixer then are fed to the dynebolic box
for stream and record
we have two remote hosts and myself
and several dropin guests
and really things work out very well
and yes Pat I did get the 5th sound card working

and also the additon of a couple slow old boxes for specifc taks to feed the mixer
seems to be the right way to go

and this is the end result

[/url] http://www.k9wkj.net/heater.jpg
[/url] http://www.k9wkj.net/mixer.jpg

Post by **Patrick** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 1:31 pm

I think we've hit a wall when it comes to audio quality with the live stream. Overall it's pretty darn good and Dan works his ass off to accomplish this. The podcast portion of the show is where we sometimes have issues. The biggest problem being with the voip quality and levels. This is made increasingly difficult because we sometimes have multiple hosts/guests with different setups and sound levels. For the most part we can't test our guests connections. By isolating the voip channel to a seperate track we can at least adjust the levels to a certain degree after the fact.

So I've installed ardour via the Agnula/Demudi distro:
http://pdavila.homelinux.org:8080/blog/?p=146

I have several reasons for wanting to do multitrack recording:
- I have the the M-audio card sitting around, I have a mixer with 4 lineouts
- this is cool stuff I 've been wanting to do for a long time
- I want to do some test recordings to see if we could do high quality multitrack recordings

The next step is hooking my mixer and start learning how to use ardour, jack and jamin. I'll read the tutorials and start slow. Ardour really looks like a monster program. We'll see.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 7:29 pm

yes I agree with Patrick. Actually I now know from experience how hard it is to get good audio. While I was recording LaGER 12 I noticed an echo going on and off, every time I heard it I died a little inside because I knew it make listening to it that much less enjoyable. I even tried editing them out any spent almost 5 hours doing that and I concluded that post-production is hard, long, tedious, and doesn't provide near the results you would like. Sound is very hard to diagnose and fix especially when you are on a tight schedule and doing things live.

k9wkj · Post by **k9wkj** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 7:55 pm

thanks for the heads up on Demudi
downloading it now

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Mon Aug 07, 2006 10:25 pm

While we're on the topic of last week's show, thought you'd be interested to know that it was mentioned on http://dot.kde.org/1154626152/

Post by **dann** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 8:05 am

k9wkj wrote:i have solved most of the problems for our show
by using 1 box with seperate sound cards for different functions
at that point isolstion is absolute
all of the sound sources go to the mixer then are fed to the dynebolic box
for stream and record
we have two remote hosts and myself
and several dropin guests

I was getting closer to something like this. Do you have a seperate channel for each remote guest? I only have a single change for the skype/asterisk calls. So the more people we get on, the more difficult it is to control the audio quality.

Invariably there seems to be one person who's audio is lower than everyone else. In the post production trying to get this person's levels up to without distorting the rest of the audio is painful.

Another problem I am noticing is that when I start a skype call (an maybe and asterisk) for some reason the mic in Audacity switches to full blast. I have it down around 6, but Audacity decides to bump up to 10. Why it does this, I do not know.