Topic: editing of live acoustic recording. I am not expert enough.....

[Papoola]

to discriminate what to do. First of all I have taped with R-09 24bit/44.1Khz and imported files in Audacity (but can try other sw if better suited). the recording was completely acoustic without any amplifiers or michrophones.
I have been luck enough not to have any clipping.
My first criteria is to keep this natural sound but do some editing.
The music is guitars+vocals and very often the vocals screams and guitars are very low level.
I have then too high level clapping that goes over the peak.
Should I use amplify to decrease of about 20dB the clapping?
What to do to the guitars?
Thanks if you will find the time for easy things to be done in this case.
Cheers

PS.: I wanna put it on a CD afterall so I will export at 16 bit with audacity (is it the best to do this step?).

[BC]

I don't use audacity, but my typical procedure for editing acoustic shows is:

First, apply a limiter/compression to the sections with loud clapping and crowd. If it is between-song clapping you can be very aggressive with setting the threshold for where the conpression kicks in. The clapping will sound a little weird if you are really compressing the heck out of it but I don't really care as it is not music. You could play around with the attack and release settings but I personally haven't doodled with them. If the clapping occurs during music you will need to do some more judicious application of your compressor so as to not overly affect the music, for these parts I use a soft limiter and set it to just compress the claps. Give that section a listen to make sure it sounds ok to you. When finished with compressing all the portions of crowd noise, my rule of thumb is that the loudest peaks in the file should be the music.

Then, I peak normalize the whole file to bring everything up in level.

This has worked pretty well for me when editing acoustic music, and made the recordings much more listenable. I am sure some others have different methods. Good luck!

[Papoola]

I would stay with windows .(
Yes, the last post is what I really expected to hear; I need to learn the procedure and any similar type of help would be great.
Cheers

[Brian Skalinder]

Regarding compression - last I checked, compression didn't work properly in Audacity.  Try it, maybe it's fixed.

Also, you may try the volume envelope tool.  Try a search in the Computer Recording forum for a few threads on that one.