Topic: Help removing a jackass

[Sloan Simpson]

I have a recording of a great show that featured one person being a complete jackass.  Stomping boots in a hardwood floor (you could hear a pin drop from the other 50 or so in the crowd, show was barely amplified acoustic guitar and voice), and actually trying to harmonize louder than the singer.

There's a few quick outbursts that would be easier to swallow if I copied one channel over the other for a few seconds. Can anyone recommend a way to smooth the transition into and out of that area. I've had to do it a couple times where it helped out a lot as far as removing the offending material, but you get that sudden imaging weirdness.  I thought I'd heard of some way to make that better?

[Brian Skalinder]

Crossfade. 

I don't have time to lay it out in great detail, but I'd take advantage of Audacity's multitrack capability.  I'd save the good L channel section as a new file, import it into the project and set it's properties to Right Channel , align it with the original bad R channel section, crossfade at the beginning and end of the area I patched, mute the bad R channel section, and mix down to a stereo file.  Basically, doing it this way with the crossfade makes for a smoother transition from the stereo portion of the file to the mono portion of the file, and vice versa.

The reason you need the 3rd file is because you need to overlap the files in order to crossfade, like this:

Line up the two WAV files in a multitrack/montage editor, so they overlap like so:

                                     [----------track 1, primary source, missing first min-----]
[-----track 2 w/ first min intact----------]

Make sure the two tracks are time-aligned for the part that overlaps by picking an easily identifiable section of each waveform to line up.  Then, apply to the parts that overlap:  crossfade-in track 1, crossfade-out track 2.

[Sloan Simpson]

Makes sense, now why didn't I think of that?

Thanks!