I guess it's what I feared. Funny how in this age of bitchin' technology, there's no audio editing software that'll do something as simple as leveling out the volume. I guess you're right, Dave - Sonic Foundry doesn't want to put its best customers out of business!
Scott: the problem with splicing the good/bad channels is that my friend (Brad, also on this board somewhere
)was getting a lot of sound from the stage in addition to some from the stacks. Hence, the guitar fade is a little louder on the left (where Adam and his monitors were) and I'd have to tweak both channels' volumes when patching while comparing them to my own recording (which had no level changes) and the actual change in volume from the guitar. Whew.
As for splicing in the whole section from another recording, this is a possibility. I also taped the show but from way back, about 25' off the floor, with Core Sound Binaurals and an AD-20. The guitar fade on both recordings sounds similar (the rest doesn't, of course) so I'll consider doing some SF tweaking and patching it in.
Then again, after I spend a lot of time doing that, I might not like what I hear and just throw all the work away...
Dave: I considered doing the reverse fade thing, too, but as far as I know, Sound Forge does only perfect fades while the fades from the recording were roughly sinusoidal (slower rate of change at the beginning and end of the fade than in the middle) because starting and stopping the turn of the gain pot is a slower process than the maximum speed of the turn itself (somewhere at roughly the midpoint of the turn). It's (practically) impossible to turn knobs at a constant velocity so the knobs' acceleration (rates of change of the fade) equals zero. Ya know what I'm blabbing about?
I tried doing a fully manual fix this weekend on a 20 second part and I was just not pleased with the results. So I'm either going to patch in the fade from my recording or just leave it alone and have everyone just accept what they hear. We'll see what Brad wants to do.
There are maybe four or so run-of-the-mill independent volume changes during the show that I can handle, but the fade in, after chatting with you fine chaps, might be too much for me (or anyone, right?) to handle.
All advice is much appreciated. Thanks!
Armen