Good job on your first tape! Be forewarned: the desire to get out and roll can be addicting.
First I'd like to give you some unsolicited information and advice about your recording that will hopefully be helpful to you.
It sounds like this was either an acoustic or otherwise low-amplitude show, so it wouldn't have mattered what level you set your recorder at for the type of imperfection you're trying to buff out, because the audience cheering and clapping is just going to be louder than the music coming from the stage and stacks in that kind of situation. Still, your intuition that you could've pushed it a little more is correct since you've got 15dB of headroom to work with in that sample, and that appears to be after you've already done some post-processing yourself given how noisy it is despite being 24-bit. Keeping the levels closer to but below 0dB in the field will generally help maximize your rig's signal-to-noise ratio and in turn keep the noise floor, which is that audible background hiss in your sample, lower in volume relative to the music. That's important, because while you
can amplify the waveform in post, doing so amplifies everything including the noise floor itself, whereas increasing your recorder's input level will usually generate a higher amplitude waveform without appreciably increasing the noise floor.
The more you tape with your gear in a variety of situations will increase your skill in choosing a good level setting. For instance, with my AT943>PCM-A10 rig I usually have the input level somewhere around 6 as my starting point, whereas at a couple extremely loud metal shows I've been to within the past year I had the input level set all the way down to 1, and on the opposite side of things I had it set at level 10 in a large venue that sends out a relatively quiet feed through their stacks. With those settings I usually have around +/-10dB of headroom. Since you also have the Sony PCM-A10 you can take advantage of Sony's smartphone app to both monitor and control the levels via Bluetooth while it's on. It's called "REC Remote: Sony IC Recorder" in the Android app store, and I recommend that you try using it especially if you ever want to engage in stealth recording.
With that out of the way, even when you select an ideal input level on your recorder and end up with a recording that has ideal dynamic range, then
still screams, cheers, claps, hoots, and hollers will be something of an annoyance. A couple of the suggestions here call for limiting and compression, both of which you can do in the free DAW
Audacity. For a single-step solution I invite you to try compression first. Try selecting a section, like the one at the very start of your sample, and apply compression with quick attack and longer look-ahead and release times to minimize pumping. It'll make things quieter and the change in sound levels between compressed and non-compressed sections is smooth. Here's your sample with some compression (-33dB threshold, ratio 8.3, lookahead 450ms, attack 1ms, release 1s) and 11dB of amplification applied in Audacity.
https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/ab1e8de8-dcdf-4d3b-be34-c14f13cd6dfe
Topic: reducing loud audience sections using either audacity or izotope (newb)? (Read 3871 times)