FWIW, I use Audition and the manual is good at describing what you need to do to use the tools, but it assumes that you know what each tool does and where you'd use it. Therein lies my problem.
Bottom line is that I only use a small number of the tools in my software when I master my recordings...but I'm pretty sure I'm only tapping into a fraction of what I could do if I only knew how to use the software.
Sigh.
Matt Quinn once said that he was starting to enjoy post-proc more then taping and I understand that now. Part of it for me is that I'm still learning and improving.
This has been the one great reason for me to troll gearslutz; for the general knowledge. Second, for a lot of packages, there are instructional youtube videos or manuals which get a good start (Ozone and Reaper come to mind here). After that I'll pick a recording and just experiment to listen to hear both what different types of settings and functions do.
Definitely a great idea! I would love to know more about Izotope Ozone and Izotope RX as those programs have done wonders for me, but I'm sure I, too, am leaving things on the shelf.
Normally I work in Wavelab and have experience with CEP (pre-Adobe), but have failed miserably with other DAW's. Audacity, Samplitude, and WaveEditor for mac have really been frustrating for me to try and learn.
I've found for audience recordings (or recordings that I can't control the mix/placement), Ozone is one of the best bang/buck plugins out there. I'm still learning new stuff about it (like, in the EQ window
on a mac, hold ALT while having music playing through the plugin and then click in the EQ window to isolate the frequency so you can work toward verifying resonances).
RX has amazing capabilities that I'm still working through myself (like the
feedback removal) or "azimuth correction" which is really just interchannel delay, but the price tag jumps astronomically if you go for the Advanced version which has better noise reduction.
I cut my teeth in Audacity (and CEP pre-Adobe as well) so I'm very familiar with it's quirks. It makes a nice substitute for CDWave on the Mac, but I'm to the point now where I do just about everything else in RX. Tempted to learn Reaper just for the mixing of multi-channel stuff. Didn't like WaveEditor, was even less intuitive than Audacity to me.
Again, usually there are no problems there, but especially with a live source the infrasonic info is often just muddy garbage anyway.
I concur, there are only a handful of occasions I've wanted to save anything below 20-30hz, usually a special effect at the show in a song or something, but >90% I'm content to ditch everything sub 30hz.