Clint_Thomas wrote:I have installed Audacity and will try to make a test voice according to the wiki. I am new to all this, I have set the sampling rate at 22050 Hz. I hope that is correct. If anyone has any other setting recommendations, please let me know
Considering that the "radio-like" post-processing we generally apply will reduce quality on purpose, 22050 Hz should be enough and help keeping the file sizes down a bit. Feel free to check the current faction voices for reference.
If you have time and room for an experiment, you might try recording a single line at 44 KHz, save a down-sampled copy at 22 KHz, and compare them, deciding for yourself if the quality drop is unacceptable.
Clint_Thomas wrote:I am trying to find a quieter location as the first test recording I made has low level white noise in the background. I believe from the AC.
Thanks
PS can I post the test here?
Don't worry too much about background noise, as 2 features of Audacity will help you a lot:
A. Noise Removal:
1. start recording, be quiet for a few seconds, to record only the background noise, then start talking.
2. select a part of that "silence".
3. from the Effects menu choose Noise Removal.
4. press the button to elaborate the noise profile (sorry, mine is in Italian and I don't remember the original caption, but it's the lone button in the upper frame labelled Step 1)
5. select the whole recording (Ctrl-A).
6. choose Noise Removal again.
7. this time, press the Apply button; the default settings for the parameters should already do a good job.
B. Insert Silence:
1. select the leading or trailing silence, or a pause between sentences.
2. press Ctrl-L to replace your selection with complete silence.
In case you're not satisfied with Audacity's noise removal, there's another great tool aimed just at that:
Gnome Wave Cleaner.