Topic: fixing dropouts

[marksk]

unfortunately, i found out after the show the cable between my battery box and i-river has a short in it and i had a few dropouts in the left channel. i brought the wav into cool edit pro and was going to paste clips from the right channel to fill the dropouts, but i'm concerned about making sure i paste it exactly where it should be. any tips? any better software recommendations?

thanks!!

[Gordon]

never really used cool edit.  I know in soundforge there is "copy other channel"  feature that works great for this.  while we're here if anyone knows a way in wavelab besides doing it by eye I'd love to know.

[jerryfreak]

ive done this in soundforge, its not hard, but very time consuming

how i do it:

block out a section with markers a few seconds before and after the part you want to replace, making sure you have a few seconds of 'good' leader and trailer to work with on the bad track.

over the length of good leader, crossfade to the swapped right channel, and back to the original channel on the trailer

repeat until it sounds good*



(*this is the 'time consuming' part!)

never really used cool edit.  I know in soundforge there is "copy other channel"  feature that works great for this.  while we're here if anyone knows a way in wavelab besides doing it by eye I'd love to know.

[marksk]

thanks. finally figured out how to do it in audacity. didn't think of crossfading the two pieces. i can see that taking quite a bit of time, but i'm sure it'll be well worth it.

another question, off topic - part of the show was a cappella. am i better off leaving that part of the show as is or amplifying? how about band members talking to the audience?

[fmaderjr]

Doing what you want to do is incredibly easy in Adobe Audition, which developed from Cool Edit Pro, so I wouldn't be surprised if they both worked the same way. If both channels are closely matched as to dB, I find that I don't need to worry about cross fading. If they are not closely matched, you might want to first take care of that with Cool Edit Pro.

Here is what I do with Audition:
1) Highlight a section of the music that includes the dropout and a little more for safety (zoom in if you want to replace very little more than the minimum necessary). You can highlight both channels at first.
2) Press the ^ or V arrow so that only the section from the good channel is highlighted.
3) Press Ctrl + C to copy the good channel
4) Press the ^ or V arrow so that only the channel including the dropout is highlighted.
5) Press delete to blank out the channel that has the dropout.
6) Press Ctrl + V to copy the section form the good channel to the channel with the dropout.
7) Play back the section you've repaired starting a few seconds before the repair to be sure you don't hear any glitches.

Doing it this way is not at all time consuming (unless you have a lot of dropouts to fix). It almost always works great for me, but as jerryfreak says you might run into some situations that don't sound right without adding cross fading. I always insure that the channels are a good match in dB's first and have so far not found it necessary to do that.