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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Audio forensics question answered

Earlier last year, I taught an audio forensics class that featured Adobe's Audition. I like Audition for teaching audio forensics in the generic, and for my day-to-day audio work.

One of the features that I use all the time is the Spectral View. In it, I can see the audio's problems - like noise - much clearer. I can also make edits to the file in that view. In a recent case, I worked almost exclusively in that view to remove an unwanted noise - which gave me the perfect platform in my notes to visually explain my work.

A question came in from a reader about doing this type of work in Sony's Sound Forge Pro 10. Unfortunately, according to Sony - you can't.

"How can I make correction on the spectral graphic?
Spectrum Analysis is used only to view a specific section of audio. You will not be able to use this tool to make corrections to your audio file, but it gives you important information on what corrections may need to be made using other tools inside Sound Forge Pro 10."

Now I find out that Sony's got a separate product for that, SpectaLayers Pro. But, as good as it might be, and as interoperable as it might be with other Sony products, it's still another purchase.

If you're doing audio enhancement, audio clarification, noise reduction, noise isolation, or identification work with audio, and you're not utilizing some sort of spectral view, I'm not sure how you're seeing the whole picture (intensity, frequency, etc.).

For now, I'm still using Audition CS6 (Creative Cloud style).

Enjoy.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I have to agree on the usefulness of the spectral view. It's nice to be able to see things you think you can hear in a recording, but can't pin down. Harmonics really show up well, too.