Get in the Mix

Did you hear that? Chances are, you're probably reading this while something is playing around you. Maybe you're catching up on those last five podcasts that you downloaded, or watching the video of the Harry Potter Puppet Pals on YouTube, or you're listening to a new CD. Wait a minute—CDs are so 1982. You're much cooler than that. It's XM all the way these days. Or wait a minute. Why listen to XM when you can get the radio streamed for free online at that really cool site that has all of the...

Let's face it—sound is all around you, and it's changing the way we promote ourselves, how we share information, and how we get by in the digital age. So let's take some time to talk about sound, how it has evolved, and how we can use Adobe's Soundbooth CS3 and Audition 3 to make the sharing of information that much more enjoyable. Sound good? Okay, I'll keep the puns to a minimum. Hear me out, though.

[If you'd like to download the project files used here to follow along, visit http://layersmagazine.com/downloads.html. All files are for personal use only.]

The Basics of Sound: Riding the WAV
Sound can be broken down into three basic components: compression, number of channels, and amount of data per second. The more channels, the bigger the sound; the more data per second, the clearer the sound. Rather than give you a lesson in sound theory, let's start by talking about some basic sampling rates: 8 kHz sounds like a telephone conversation, 44.1 kHz sounds like a CD, 48 kHz is usually found on DVDs and your miniDV camcorders, and 96 kHz and higher is a fine sound for the world of high definition audio.

The most common of all sounds in the computer world is that of the Waveform format, or WAV (pronounced "wave") for short. Developed by Microsoft and IBM, it's largely considered to be a standard for great audio quality as it's usually uncompressed with 2 channels (one for left, one for right or stereo) at 44,100 samples per second (or hertz). This is also represented as 44.1 kHz.

Clear as that sound may be, it has one big disadvantage—it's huge! I recorded 60 seconds of audio and the file size was a whopping 10 MB. If you figure an average song to be about 4 minutes 30 seconds, your file size would come in at around 45 MB. This may be good if you're producing a CD, but to transfer information back and forth, it's too big.

Big, Big Sound—Itty Bitty Space
Enter lossy compression. Designed to reduce the size of the audio file—yet keep it clear—lossy compression emerged as a way to fit a lot of information into a small space. The Fraunhofer Society, a German think tank, helped develop a compression formula that was adopted by the Moving Pictures Experts Group, or MPEG. This audio standard was the third in a series, hence the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 format—the birth of the MP3.

Overnight, people began freeing their songs from their veritable CD prisons by converting (ripping) them to MP3 using the appropriate encoder program. Different compression formats emerged, each touting their codec (the program responsible for converting the file) as better than the other—an argument that plays on to this very day.

Although some sound quality is lost in the compression process, many users believe that it's a fair tradeoff for the size of the file that's created (my 10-MB, 60-second file was reduced to 183 KB—small enough to send as an email attachment). This innovation also lowered the tech barrier and sparked the sharing of music online, bringing us Napster, Rhapsody, and iTunes.

Sound in a Box

When it comes to capturing sound, there are several options: computer microphones, professional microphones, video, and USB microphones.

Computer Mics
Computer microphones can be internal (such as the ones found in the cases of many laptop computers) or attached to the microphone part of a sound card on a desktop computer. Types of microphones vary, but for the most part you can get a standard desktop microphone for less than $40. While this might seem like the best and quickest way to satisfy your audio needs, be very mindful of background noises and feedback. Even with the best computer microphones, there can be quite a bit of feedback and static in the recordings. This may have more to do with the internals of the sound card rather than the mic, but it's common enough for me to usually avoid those types of mics. (If I'm looking just to record audio in the telephone-like range, I'll use a computer mic and make sure that I'm capturing the audio at about 16 kHZ, 8 bit, and mono.)

These mics are also good for any VoIP calling (Voice Over Internet Protocol) that you may be doing (such as Skype, Yahoo, etc.), but make sure if you're using them that you wear headphones. If you don't, the sound that comes out of your computer speakers will spill into the mic and get transmitted back to your call, causing a weird echo (this is also the reason why you see so many headphone/mic combinations these days).

Professional Mics

Professional microphones offer you a much better level of quality in recording music or voice, but their obvious increase in price makes it a little harder for someone to get in the game. When working with professional mics, you can't just plug them into the back of the computer. These mics have a specific type of connector (XLR connector) that requires you to plug them into a mixer before they go into your computer. A typical setup will have a mic on one side, a computer on the other, and a digital audio interface in between the two, such as the Tascam US-144 (www.tascam.com/details;9,15,70,14.html). Before recording, you must make sure that all of the settings in your digital audio interface are set to match your recording conditions, often requiring a longer setup time. The audio will definitely be worth the wait.

Camcorder Mics
When capturing audio with a video camera, a typical miniDV camcorder can usually record four channels at 32 kHz or two channels at 48 kHz. That's a very good sound quality for your video, but is often limited by the type of microphone that's placed on the camera.

USB Mics
As the Internet pushes faster toward self-publishing, microphones have adapted to keep up with the need, bringing us the USB mic. A USB mic is the best of both worlds—a professional microphone on one side, and a USB direct connection on the other. This has eliminated the need for interfaces or mixers, allowing you to make these changes in the sound editor of your choice. You simply plug in the mic, start up your software, and begin recording.

Soundbooth CS3—Sound Editing for the Rest of Us

If you're looking for a program to edit sound and you're not a sound engineer, and the idea of making sinosudial waves between tracks doesn't excite you (as it does me), Soundbooth is the tool to dig into. (Note: Soundbooth is available individually or as part of Creative Suite 3 Production Premium.) It supports the most popular audio formats: WAV, AIFF, MP3, and WMA. On the video side, you can open MPEG, QuickTime, AVI, and WMV to edit the sound within the video. Adobe has done a great job of taking the pain out of sound editing by taking the most common editing tasks and placing them at your fingertips. Many of these editing tasks can even be done from one window.

Trimming the Fat
Let's say you want to work with trimming and fading audio. Opening the file in Soundbooth, you'll notice two tabs to either side of the waveform in the Editor panel. These tabs correspond with the start and end of the sound file. To trim the audio file, drag these tabs to where you want the audio to begin and end and the file is cut to its new length. Soundbooth behaves slightly differently with video; instead of trimming the selection, it converts the sound to silence so that the audio and video are kept in sync.

At the upper corners of the Editor panel, you'll see Fade In and Fade Out handles. To control the fade, simply click-and-drag the handles. If you drag the handles horizontally left or right, they perform a linear fade, but if you move the mouse up while dragging, it changes to a logarithmic fade (fast start then slows down), or if you drag down it changes to an exponential fade (slow start then speeds up). The fades will stay editable until you save and close the file.

Changing the volume of a specific portion of the file can also be done from the Editor panel. Highlight the section in the file that you would like to change and a volume pop-up bubble will appear. From this bubble, you can drag the volume numbers to the left to decrease the volume of the selection, or to the right to increase the volume. Once you let go of the mouse, the audio file changes.

Get the Noise Out
Sound cleanup is addressed with a variety of tools, but my favorite has to be the noise reducer. To follow along here, go to the Layers magazine website and download the MP3 files associated with this article. Good-liquor.mp3 is a clip of the song "Good Liquor Gonna Carry Me Down" by Bill Broonzy. (This song sits in the public domain. There are tons of places to get good free samples of music to make interesting creations, but that's another article altogether.) A great song, but due to its time period, it suffers from the noise, cracks, and hisses of a vintage piece. Let's clean this up a bit.
Clicking on the Noise button in the Clean Up Audio section of the Tasks panel presents a dialog that lets you control how aggressive the program is at detecting imperfections, and by how much it should reduce those imperfections. Clicking on the Preview button lets you hear a sample of your changes, and you can even adjust the controls during the preview. Once you have taken out the appropriate amount of noise (and remember, it's vintage—so don't take out all of the noise), click OK and you have a cleaned file.

Need to remove unwanted sound? No problem. Open cellphone.mp3 for a quick tour (I made the file a little noisy so you can play with the noise cleanup here as well). Start by changing from your regular view to the Spectral Frequency Display view by pressing Shift-F. This view lets you see different ranges of sound better, and it's easy to see where the cell phone is ringing. Select the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and drag along one of the two orange lines that's making the noise. Once you have the noise selected, drag the volume slider in the pop-up bubble as far left as it will go and it will silence the sound. Once you have done it for both lines, the sound will be cleaned up (I've also added a finished file for you to compare).

Make Your Own Score
Soundbooth can also generate interesting original compositions using the AutoCompose Score feature. Located under the Tasks panel, you can load a variety of scores that have been preinstalled on your computer. Once the score is loaded, click the Keyframing button next to Editing in the Tasks panel, and you can now click on the various parts of the composition to insert control points. Once the points have been inserted, you can arrange the intensity of the composition. You can even select from a predefined set of duration times to take the fuss out of editing. Once completed, you can export that sound score into the file type of your choice. (For more on the AutoCompose Score feature, see Layers TV: Episode 5 at www.layersmagazine.com/tv.) For the more adventurous, you can even go online and purchase scores from Resource Central (Command-7 [PC: Ctrl-7]), an online music library component built right into Soundbooth.

Soundbooth also contains more than 15 filters, tools to aid Flash designers in the use of audio, and roundtrip editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. Aside from all of these great features, there are a couple of things that I would like to have seen. When editing videos, supporting multiple tracks (music, narration, effects) and crossfading would have been very welcome. A bigger score library at its outset would also have been a great plus. However, for the person who wants to jump in—create or edit—and get out, Soundbooth is a welcome addition.

Audition CS3—the Multitrack, Multichannel Machine

When your sound projects require you to layer multiple files, crossfade with precision, and automate effects, Audition is the tool for you if you're a PC user (Mac users can run Audition with Boot Camp and Windows installed). Adjusting fade in and fade out points works exactly the same as in Soundbooth CS3—a welcome new feature in Audition CS3. Simply click on either the Fade In or Fade Out handle and drag horizontally left or right to add a linear fade (dragging up or down will also change the type of fade).

Another new feature in Audition that's similar to Soundbooth is that you can select an area of the file and increase or decrease the volume bubble to the desired volume.

Healing sounds is also similar to Soundbooth. Switch over to your spectral view by pressing Shift-F and you'll be able to find your offending sounds visually. Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to highlight the offending sound, then use your volume adjustment to get rid of it. The fact that Adobe kept a lot of these tools similar between both programs really lowers the learning curve for users who may eventually want to upgrade to Audition from Soundbooth.

To trim a selection in Audition, highlight the area that you want to retain. Once you have it selected, choose Edit>Trim to retain that selection. All of the data that's not selected will be deleted.

Noise reduction has gotten better with the implementation of VST (Virtual Studio Technology)-based noise reduction. Prior to CS3, noise reduction effects were made under the Edit menu (don't worry, those are still there). The problem was that you didn't have control over that edit as an effect in Multitrack mode. Because VST is a real-time effect, you can run Adaptive Noise Reduction as if it were any other effect in Multitrack mode, and tweak it as you see fit. Audition CS3 also includes a VST plug-in manager, allowing you to turn off and on VST plug-ins as needed.

Bonus Tracks

The pièce de résistance in Audition, however, is its Multitrack editor. In Multitrack mode, you can import multitudes of WAV files and arrange them in various combinations providing great depth in your musical or soundtrack creations.

I went online and downloaded a couple of free sound files from Soundsnap (http://soundsnap.com)—a great resource to get cool sounds for your projects. I also extracted a stock sound from another audio program. So how easy is it to mix these four sounds together in a composition? Turns out—very easy. Let's see how.

Start a multitrack session by clicking on the Multitrack icon. Once in Multitrack mode, go to File>Import and select all of the tracks in the folder. Now, we have two drum tracks, a rain track, and a vocal track. I know that the rain track and the drum tracks are going to loop. I don't want to go into the editor and have to copy and paste, paste, paste, and paste to create a loop. That's redundant.

In Audition, I can create a loop file from the WAVs that I've imported. Double-click on the Crime-Drumloop1.wav file and it will bring you into Edit mode. From there, choose File>File Info. In the File Info dialog you'll see a Loop Info tab. Click on the radio button for Loop under the Source Waveform Information section. Save the file, and you have a loop ready to use in Multitrack mode. Do the same for Crime-Drumloop-2.wav and the rain WAV file.

Switch back to Multitrack mode and drag the rain track to the Track 1 area. (If you Right-click, you can drag the file to the beginning of the session.) We want to take this rain track and loop it out a little. Drag the WAV from the right edge, and you'll notice that it automatically loops the file. You can extend this out as far as you wish. Do the same to the drum track, and place it wherever you'd like—you're now free to compose your masterpiece.

Once it's completed, you can mix down your session by choosing Edit>Mixdown to New File>Master Output in Session. From there, you can save the file in whatever sound format you choose. I have a folder set up in the download files that includes a finished session and mixdown of my files. In it you'll notice that I not only used the looping, but also incorporated effects on the files, as well as fades to create a more polished piece.

A final feature that made me giddy was the Surround Encoder built into Audition CS3. In the Surround Encoder, you can grab individual tracks and specify where you want them to be placed aurally, using drag-and-drop functionality. From there, you can export individual files or a mixed file for 5.1 surround sound! Now keep in mind that to hear these small differences, you're going to need a sound card and system capable of delivering 5.1 (a sound card with six outputs). For those who have it, mix away!

It's exciting to see that Soundbooth and Audition CS3 really do bring the best in audio editing to the widest possible audience. These tools will surely raise the bar in your multimedia creations with very little fuss. Bigger, faster, easier—that's always music to my ears.

Rafael "RC" Concepcion is an Education and Curriculum Developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. An Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop and Illustrator, RC has more than 10 years' experience in the I.T. and e-commerce industry and has hosted training seminars in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America.

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