Topic: Inverted caps while doing binaural recording, what should I do ?

[fandelive]

Hi,

I did a binaural recording using two omni caps mounted on the branches of my eye-glasses, next to my ears.
The problem is that I inverted left/right caps. I used that kind of "Y" miniature microphones plugged into a portable MD recorder.

Still, it is possible to reverse left/right channels in post, but is it worth a try considering it is a binaural recording and the head/baffle thing creating spaciality ?

Thank you

[page]

Hi,

I did a binaural recording using two omni caps mounted on the branches of my eye-glasses, next to my ears.
The problem is that I inverted left/right caps. I used that kind of "Y" miniature microphones plugged into a portable MD recorder.

Still, it is possible to reverse left/right channels in post, but is it worth a try considering it is a binaural recording and the head/baffle thing creating spaciality ?

Thank you

So your left channel is currently what was on your right ear? Did I understand that correctly? If so, that's easy enough to fix, in audacity (and any other editor for that matter), you can just reassign the channels to the opposite side.

[SmokinJoe]

Yes, in audacity, I would:
- grab the little triangle drop down menu on the left side of the file (near the gain slider is):
- "split stereo track".  Now you have L/R as 2 separate tracks
- grab the bottom track and select "move track up"
- grab the top track and select "make stereo track".

[it-goes-to-eleven]

Yes, in audacity, I would:
- grab the little triangle drop down menu on the left side of the file (near the gain slider is):
- "split stereo track".  Now you have L/R as 2 separate tracks
- grab the bottom track and select "move track up"
- grab the top track and select "make stereo track".

It blows my mind that, years later, audacity still hasn't added a simple "swap channels" feature.
It's just absurd to make a user go through that just to swap a couple of tracks.  It makes me think those in control of the UI will never 'get it'.

[fandelive]

Ok, thank you very much 

[dorrcoq]

Yes, in audacity, I would:
- grab the little triangle drop down menu on the left side of the file (near the gain slider is):
- "split stereo track".  Now you have L/R as 2 separate tracks
- grab the bottom track and select "move track up"
- grab the top track and select "make stereo track".

It blows my mind that, years later, audacity still hasn't added a simple "swap channels" feature.
It's just absurd to make a user go through that just to swap a couple of tracks.  It makes me think those in control of the UI will never 'get it'.

What do you want for free?

[Brian Skalinder]

No doubt Audacity's UI for swapping channels is screwy.  That said, all the commonly used audio editors have their own versions of screwy UI issues.  I never found the swap channel screwiness of much significance.

[SmokinJoe]

Yes, in audacity, I would:
- grab the little triangle drop down menu on the left side of the file (near the gain slider is):
- "split stereo track".  Now you have L/R as 2 separate tracks
- grab the bottom track and select "move track up"
- grab the top track and select "make stereo track".

It blows my mind that, years later, audacity still hasn't added a simple "swap channels" feature.
It's just absurd to make a user go through that just to swap a couple of tracks.  It makes me think those in control of the UI will never 'get it'.

It's open source.  Feel free to write that code and contribute it to the project and the next version will have your feature.  Thus far no one has felt the need bad enough to write the code.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

It's open source.  Feel free to write that code and contribute it to the project and the next version will have your feature.  Thus far no one has felt the need bad enough to write the code.

Do you have experience working with that project's dev team and their feature and arch approval process?  You are probably aware that just because a project is open source does not mean they will accept features that outside developers submit.   Many projects are rather rigid on feature set, gui, etc... And that is perfectly understandable, but sometimes it can be frustrating.

I have a lot of other issues with how audacity behaves.  An example... Let's say I invoke audacity on a file via 'audacity something.wav', modify the file, and then want to save it with a new name.  Audacity does not default to the directory that I am working in.  Nor does it provide a quick way to get to the current directory.  I need to navigate the file system to the current directory.   I think that is cumbersome.   But, apparently, someone on the dev team feels strongly about that behavior.   I wrote a wrapper script that worked around the issue, but that broke in recent versions.

[SmokinJoe]

I'm sorry if I came across as an arrogant open source bigot.  I didn't mean to.

What I generally try to do when I find open source software doesn't do what I want is make the changes I want, compile and run that, and now it does what I want.  Sometimes I send a patch to someone on the project team, or post it on a forum, and I have no freakin' idea if it ever gets acted upon.  I've never felt the need to do this with Audacity, I'm generally content with it's idiosyncrasies, I'm referring to open source in general. I'm not completely blowing smoke out my ass, I actually have done this with other code including linux kernel driver modules, server code, stuff like that, just not audacity.

My first point is that generally this software (Audacity, The Gimp) has everything we need.  If I can't see it, probably it's incorporated in a very clever way that I don't understand yet.  Rather than ask the developers to dumb it down, perhaps I need to educate myself.  In this case, I think splitting tracks and manipulating them as pieces is the beginning of a powerful concept, that is useful in general.   Swapping tracks is one small use for that.

My second point is that open source projects makes progress when someone sees a need and codes a solution.  In this case, if I can do something in 3 clicks, (split, move up, make stereo track) I personally don't think it's worth a lot of effort to make it "simpler", but everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and if you share your opinion and your code, it might be used.  In this case it would probably be a nyquist plugin, which I suspect is much easier to get adopted than a core code change.

[datbrad]

I have used Audacity's method to swap channels by spliting the tracks to swap and then rejoin them several times. The "swap channels" option in the Wavelab 6 is easier, but with Audacity it's basically 2 extra clicks of the mouse that take a few seconds. To me, when I consider the ease of use with the editing features in Audacity to other software I have tried, it more than makes up for a couple of extra steps to swap channels. I got Wavelab 6 about a year ago, and yet I still lean towards Audacity most of the time.