User talk:Macropode

Barack Obama Spoken Article Assessment

Thanks for the assessment of my reading of the Barack Obama article! I'll fix the 96kbps issue very soon, and aim for higher accuracy when I re-read the article in the near future! Regards, Rahzel 07:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Spoken Article Assessment

Thanks for the assessment on my Julius Caesar recording. I changed the recording to mono and I think I succeeded in making it 48 kbps instead of 96. Thanks for catching that! -- Kevin F. Story 21:26, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Taijin Kyofusho

Try tie-jin kyaw-aww-phoo-shaw-aww. Hard J as in jug, Y as a consonant, and aw as in paw. Note the frequent mistake English-speakers make in pronouncing Kyoto as either kye-oh-tow or key-oh-tow; it should be kyaw-aww-taw. This is probably strictly wrong but it's better than nothing. Cheers. --Euniana/Talk/Blog 00:29, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Euniana, it's certainly closer to the mark than my first attempt. I'll fix that article in the coming week. Never having had much exposure to cultures other than the one I was brought up in is certainly a disadvantage in producing some spoken articles; I don't want to mislead anyone with incorrect pronunciation. An investigation of (spoken) Wikipedia in other languages might be the way to go. --Macropode 13:00, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Eureka Stockade

I'm just listening to it now and it's great!! Really well done. Your voice is perfect for this project. :) pfctdayelise 11:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Coconut crab

Great voice work! --Eeee 07:45, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Oi! Steady on, you two. A person could get a fat ego with talk like that flying around!  :) --Macropode 03:58, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Lend Me Your Ear

Hey... I've been wanting to create some spoken word articles for awhile but haven't until today. I created a *test* file on a small article and would like you to take a listen for some contructive feedback before I begin creating more. Anyway, if you have the time please take a look at Parks_of_Chicago. Jasenlee 03:15, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Social anxiety

Hi, I'm not sure if you've done a new recording of SA, but this is just to let you know, I will probably expand the article this week. Gflores ^Talk 21:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Spoken articles

Thanks for the compliment! By the way, I'm impressed with how long you've been with the project. I think a lot of the contributions come from people who record a few articles and then seem to lose interest. (I'm not sure how long I'll be able to contribute, since I don't know what I'll be doing this year.) It's good that you've stuck to it. And your recordings are of fairly good quality, too. T J McKenzie 00:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Social anxiety

I was wondering if you could show your opinion on what the title of the article should be (social anxiety disorder, social phobia, social anxiety). Discussion is here [1]. I propose that a new article be created named social anxiety disorder with social phobia redirecting to it and social anxiety will remain that talks about the more common anxiety. You may think differently though. Appreciate your input. :) Gflores^Talk 18:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the "Criticisms" edit. That sounds a lot better now. WookMuff 08:08, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Spoken article reply

Hi, thanks for your note. I replied on my talk page so it's all in one place :) --Laura S 22:13, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey there. (I'm putting this here because it's literally a reply to your spoken article, specifically Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. :P) Nice recording job - I like your voice. Reminds me of a documentary narrator. Then again, for some reason I've always been biased against Received Pronunciation and in favor of Aussie English. Moulder 06:53, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Well thanks for the compliment but that's not my article :) the only "spacey" one I did was Solar eclipse. -- Laura S | talk to me 12:53, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Looks like we'll have to wait for Raul654 to get back from vacation before we have anything to discuss, since he's the only one on the page who's pushing "con" right now. I don't like his throwing the icon in with "advertisements" for projects since it really isn't an advert...it's another version of the file. I also chafe at his throwing his weight around with statements like "I'm the director of this committee" and "I've been around longer than you have been." Smacks of bad faith, IMHO, but I don't want to get into a power struggle here. That's not fun for anyone. Let's hope we can resolve this satisfactorally. For the record, it might be worth looking through Wikipedia policy to see what we can find regarding Wikipedia and "reusers". I can't find anything. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. I don't want to be one of those people who does the "let's ask Jimbo" thing, but it seems like we need to look for precendent to build upon. So far, I've taken the policy that Wikipedia needs to be easy to access and to take advantage of the web as a medium (found in Wiki is not paper and m:wiki is not paper). Ckamaeleon ((T)) 13:54, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't realise. Feel free. :) Rebecca 07:09, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks for the compliment! I'm counting on being able contribute more to the project in the future.

--Alekjds 16:01, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Spoken archive

Certainly not - looks like the page is due for an archiving! -SCEhardT 02:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank You for Your Spoken Article Reviews!

Thank you for adding my articles under your review list. I cannot believe your well-tuned ears and patience! Those mistakes in reading you caught on Article One of the United States Constitution.ogg were spot on (one day in the future when I summon enough patience I will correct them, recording it the first time was a monumental task for me enough :P). I greatly appreciated your reviews. Unfortunately my mic is somewhat low in volume when recording audio recordings. I tried to up the db level but the quality of the recording becomes poorer and too much fuzz gets added to the audio. As far as adjusting the kbps, I attempted to export an .ogg with the proper settings and was successful to do so but somehow the recording become mechanical sounding along with distracting echoes and sacrificing some quality. I also listened to your own audio recordings and I must say they are of excellent quality. All in all, I quite enjoy the WP:SPOKEN project, and longstanding members of it such as yourself are doing an excellent job and inspire me to continue adding to it in the small way I can. Once again thank you :).¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 21:11, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Spoken Article Reviews

Hi Macropode; many thanks for your very prompt assessments of my first spoken article attempts. As you can see, though, I'm still having trouble with the encoding arrangements ... I use Audacity, and having checked the settings I had used on my first article (James Bulger after you posted your review, I saw the "Quality" slider was at "5 out of 10" - hence the 96kbps. So before doing the next three, I adjusted this to "3 out of 10", while making sure that I was still recording at 44.1 kHz mono ... unfortunately, this has only reduced the quality to 80kbps. Oh dear...! Can you suggest anything I might be doing wrong? With thanks from a technologically naïve Wikipedian - Hassocks5489 09:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

You're not necessarily doing anything wrong, and many others seem to be having the same problem.

Although it may sound like a fairly drastic measure, the key to achieving the correct bitrate in Audacity (in the Linux version I'm familiar with), is to move the "Quality" slider all the way to the lowest setting. This compresses the audio more, and will produce the required 48 kbps file. I've personally done this with all the recordings listed on my user page. Although there are minor differences in the configuration dialogue boxes, the same most likely applies in the Windows version. It would be a great help if you would try this with the next audio file you upload so that I can verify that the Windows version behaves the same and include the information in documentation I'm working on to help people with these kinds of issues.

The recommendation of 48 kbps encoding in the recording guidelines arises from the need to keep spoken audio files on Wikipedia as small as possible. Apart from video, which to my knowledge there's very little of on Wikipedia, our large multi-megabyte spoken audio files are probably (per unit) the biggest space-users on the Wikimedia servers, which makes it important to keep the file sizes down. Smaller files are also easier to download, so in practice, more people will get to listen to your recordings if you compress them more.

The default setting of "5", or 96 kbps is a good general-purpose setting which will give reasonably good results with music, which requires considerably more "space" or "bandwidth" than voice does to sound good. If you've ever heard music over a telephone line you might have noticed that while the music generally sounds pretty "tinny" and 'orrible, someone speaking on the other end should, if they're using a modern telephone (and the line's okay!), sound fairly natural. That's because telephone lines are designed to only carry the specific narrow range of frequencies produced by the human voice, and not the much broader range required by music. This way the telephone company can, essentially, squeeze more 'phone conversations down the same cable than they'd be able to if they had to accommodate the broader frequency range required to transmit music well.

Essentially the same principle applies to audio recordings. While a recording of music encoded to Ogg Vorbis (or any other compressed format, for that matter) at 48 thousand bits per second (kbps) will sound very noticeably worse than one encoded at 96 kbps, a voice recording will only suffer a fairly insignificant loss of quality, because voice doesn't need all the "space" provided by encoding at the higher speeds. What this produces is a very much smaller audio file which contains far less unused "space" or "bandwidth, hence the 48 kbps requirement for Wikipedia audio files.

I hope this helps, and doesn't just serve to confuse the issue further. Cheers! -- Macropode 11:56, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Macropode; that is very clear and helpful. I will record my next file at Quality setting "1" accordingly. I expect it will be ready by this coming Sunday. Many thanks again! Hassocks5489 12:25, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the file I submitted today (Premier League) is at 48kbps; it's a lot smaller than my others, despite being longer. Let me know with a quick reply just to confirm. Cheers, Hassocks5489 18:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It's showing nominal 60 kbps, average 30 kbps. More importantly, the file's not too big given the size of the article, and it sounds good, so go for it! -- Macropode 23:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Great, thanks for confirming that. I'll try to re-record the bit where I screwed up the player transfers; the microphone suddenly went haywire, with lots of weird interference, so I was probably too distracted by that to remember to check the factual content! Hassocks5489 08:49, 6 March 2007 (UTC) - (New corrected version uploaded with the same name tonight.) Hassocks5489 23:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Spoken article reviews

Thanks for your reviews of my three spoken articles! I thought the correct .ogg compression in Audacity was achieved by setting the quality to 3, but from reading above I see this isn't the case; I'll be sure to correct this in the next article I read out. Concerning the "breath-thumps", do you have any suggestions for another material to create a screen out of? Being a guy, I don't happen to have many tights lying around the place. =P Cheers,  Panser Born  (talk) 18:12, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

For making inexpensive microphone "pop-screens" they have no equal. Basically, you're looking for a fabric that's:

• Thin. The idea is to diffuse the little "blasts" of breath that occur when you make certain sounds, so that they don't impinge on the microphone and create that "thumpy" noise. At the same time, you want to let the high frequencies in sounds like "ess" and "tee" through, so your voice doesn't sound muffled.
• Stretchy, so the fabric easily conforms to the shape of your wire loop and can be made to stretch fairly evenly over it. This is a job best done by two people; one stretches the fabric taut over the loop while the other sews around it.

My spouse recommends, if you don't have a friend or relative who's willing to donate a pair, that you pick some up from your local supermarket, where they are (in Australia) readily available and cheap. Have fun! -- Macropode 05:34, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Alright, thanks! I'm sure I'll be able to get hold of some tights from somewhere. Cheers,  Panser Born  (talk) 09:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I've now exported and uploaded a lower quality .ogg file (which should now be 48kbps - it certainly managed to shave 5mb off the previous file size) from the master recording for the Star Wars Episode I article, and I thought I'd let you know so you can update the assessment if you wish. I also took the opportunity to correct my pronunciation of "patois". Both the Star Wars Episode II and recordings have undergone the same treatment.  Panser Born  (talk) 20:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! For the many people with slow internet, 5 mega bytes can make the difference between an enjoyable listen and a recording that's just too big to download.

All new Wikipedia spoken recording pages have been going on my watchlist so I can check for updates; I'll start doing that for the ones on Commons too. I'll update the reviews for the above-mentioned recordings shortly. Cheers! -- Macropode 11:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

The "pop-screen" solution (good term!) I use when recording is rather basic and crude, but it works very well: I set the microphone up on my desk, then attach a clean unfolded handkerchief to an adjacent surface (a small filing cabinet which sits on my desk), and hold the other end of the handkerchief to pull it tight. My microphone is one of those very thin "stick" types that is too small to fit a screen to. The fabric is thin enough to let the high-frequency sounds through. (Incidentally, as referred to by Macropode on the review of Sheffield, the difference between the effect of using this screen and not doing so can be heard at the end: I originally recorded the GFDL bit right at the start of my involvement in the project, without using a screen, and have simply pasted it on to the end of each recording. The difference is quite noticeable! I will re-record the GFDL bit as suggested.) Hassocks5489 11:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Spreading a little cheer!

		The Spoken Barnstar
		For all of your contributions towards Wikiproject Spoken Wikipedia, which have taken the form of not only a lengthly number of .ogg files, but many helpful spoken article reviews! -Panser Born- (talk) 02:15, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Re: Review of

Dear Macropode, Thank you for reviewing this spoken word article produced by myself for WP:WSW - I have seen the review, and as a result, have made changes to the file and re-uploaded it to include the changes you recommended, including Stereo to Mono - Corrections to the spoken text and amendment to the OGG file quality, which is now 48kb/s as suggested. Please would you be kind enough to re-review the article and comment upon it as you see fit. Your suggestions are always welcome. Thor Malmjursson 12:38, 2 April 2007 (UTC) (talk)

Spoken Wikipedia review

Thanks for your interest in my work! Though I normally don't let personal attacks bother me in Wikipedia content discussions, yours was directed towards a good friend who happened to be in the next room over playing guitar while I recorded the spoken version of Coitus interruptus. I would appreciate it if our conversation remains within the guidelines of the Wikipedia:No personal attacks policy. If you would like to suggest a way of removing this music from my piece in post processing or offer up any constructive criticism, I would be delighted to discuss more with you. I am a huge fan of the work you've done with the Spoken Wikipedia project thus far. -WAZAAAA 05:21, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

For someone who so obviously enjoys making joke recordings of serious Wikipedia articles, you certainly do lose your sense of humour quickly when someone jokes about your work! Cheers!-- Macropode 06:59, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I do enjoy making audio-illustrated Spoken Wikipedia articles, but I wouldn't consider the recordings "jokes". I like to make them interesting for the listeners, thereby enhancing their comprehension of the content. While I love listening to all spoken Wikipedia articles, I find the monotone straight ones harder to understand. In the Coitus interruptus recording, the use of major and minor keys distinguished sections to enhance audio content comprehension. I believe, if done correctly, Spoken Wikipedia articles can be both fun to listen to and educational.

Regarding a lack of humo(u)r when it comes to verbally describing my work, I'd argue that maintaining a higher level of discourse when discussing Project:SpokenWikipedia articles and saving the humo(u)r for non-administrative matters keeps policy relevant, and articles informative and, sometimes, entertaining. Cheers, no jeers, WAZAAAA 20:06, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I thank you for reviewing my work, and respectfully disagree with your decision to remove references to my spoken Wikipedia recordings File:Teabagging.ogg and File:CoitusInterruptus.ogg. In the interest of finding a balance between compelling audio and "entirely unsuitable for a formal encyclopedia / violates Wikipedia policy," I would like to know the specific policy regarding what is appropriate.

If changing voices during a piece or including non-spoken (but still GFDL'd) elements are disallowed by current Project:SpokenWikipedia policy, would there be a possibility of publishing these as a part of a different project? Maybe I could begin drumming up support for an InterestingSpokenWikipedia project? Thanks for any direction or guidance you can lend. -WAZAAAA 20:33, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

User:HisSpaceResearch - responding to your spoken article assessment

Thanks for reviewing my spoken articles on Caravan (band) and The Jeremy Kyle Show.

As I can see you are heavily involved with the Spoken Wikipedia project, I'd like to bring up an issue: I've recorded several other spoken articles but cannot upload them (the page fails when I try to upload them) as they are too large in file size. I made them using Audacity, reduced the noise, and made them .ogg files. I've done long recordings about various bands including Soft Machine, Can (band), Family (band), and King Crimson, some of which I'm not entirely convinced are of top quality, although the one for Soft Machine is certainly good.

I'd also like to bring up the issue of User:WAZAAAA and his recordings. Teabagging and Coitus interruptus are obviously jokes, although his spoken style on Reggae has influenced my spoken style. I must admit that I do find his joke recordings amusing, although that probably has to do with the fact that my sense of humour is a little bit left of centre.

-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 22:14, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Your recordings aren't in Ogg Vorbis format, they're un-compressed Wav files with an .ogg extension, which is why they're over the file size upload limit. Unless you're using the Linux version of Audacity, I can't assist you with this. Try one of the recording assistance people.

[The Reggae recording (file reference removed WAZAAAA (talk) 06:14, 2 December 2017 (UTC))] was uploaded at a time well before the Spoken project had any procedures in place to ensure that spoken versions of articles came up to the same standard that the rest of Wikipedia has to live up to.

My guess, at least when it comes to the music ones, is that you like the subject you're narrating about. If you want others who feel the same way to be able to listen to some good spoken recordings about their favourite British bands, I'd respectfully suggest that you have a think about it before you wind up the "Humour" knob. A left-of-centre sense of humour's fine, but in the context of a spoken encyclopedia article, it'll just make you sound like a prat. -- Macropode 06:19, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Cat, spoken wiki evaluation

"Appropriate low-level background noises in this recording. :)" MEW!!!!!!! lol.... DollieLlama 09:42, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I can't see my new version.

I made a newer version of with updated info to update it to the current version of Windows "Vienna", but I can't see the new info, and Yahoo! Music Jukebox isn't working for me so I can't hear if the audio has been updated to match the article. Could you please check and see if the audio has changed and see if the info has changed too. Also tell me if you like the recording. Please respond to my Talk page. Thanks in advance.--Chetblong 20:09, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for reveiwing my recording and helping out. But I still have a problem: the recording in the article Windows Vienna has not been updated, could you please update it and tell me how to from now on? Reply to my talk page. Thanks in advance. --Chetblong 12:04, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

My recording.

Hey could you please review for me again? I fixed the pronunciation of "paradigm" and added the spoken license statement. Please reply to my talk page. Thanks in advance. :) Chetblong 22:15, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Rindfleisch...

Hi, since I found Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and its German spoken article, I thought that the english-speaking community should get something similar too ;) And here it is - my first spoken article: Image:En-Rinderkennzeichnungs-und-Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz-article.ogg

Since I'm not into the spoken articles guidelines, I'd be happy if you could listen to/check the file. Thanks :) -- Gerolsteiner91 (glugg) 12:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your contribution! I'll post a review at Image_talk:En-Rinderkennzeichnungs-und-Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz-article.ogg shortly (I would have done it already, but I've been away from En.Wikipedia for a few weeks). -- Macropode 10:15, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Done. Don't forget to add a link to your recording to the article, and to the Spoken articles list. -- Macropode 10:06, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks!

Lol cool thanks for reviewing my Urbanization recording, it was one of my firsts and yeah kind of bad but lol thanks for medium-medium-high marks! It's been too long since I've done voice-work. Davumaya 21:05, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for reviewing the Minneapolis recording! Sorry I'm slow to respond. You're a great guy. .:DavuMaya:. 08:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Double Thanks!

P.B. Pilhet has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

Hi, Macropode. I just wanted to stop by and say thanks for giving me such good reviews on my two spoken articles! I really didn't think I put that much effort into them :-) Thanks again! -- 00:55, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Libravox review

Thanks you for the feedback and review. I'll be sure to take the critique to heart on my future projects! 16:21, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Shaw & Crompton

Hi Macropode,

Thanks for your comments. The problems have arisen from the fact that I have bought a new computer and have had to set up Audacity on it again. For some reason, when I came to do a recording for the first time, the settings had changed significantly; it took me a long time changing various parameters to strike a balance between getting any audible output at all and having excessive background noise. On my old computer, the voice output was pretty much in proportion to the my normal speaking voice; however, when I tried speaking at the same level with the mike attached to my new one, virtually nothing could be heard! I played around, finding a "boost" enhancement in the Control Panel, but even then, I had to enhance the sound level twice and do a double dose of noise reduction. Do you think this could be related to the microphone not liking the computer, or to the software? (The mike is >10 years old now, and it was pretty cheap even then!! :)) Also, I thought I had recorded it in mono ... I'll have to check (perhaps it defaulted back to stereo, although I was sure there was only one track recorded; when I get home from work, I'll have a look at the file and make the necessary changes). Oops - I see what I did - that won't happen again! ;) As I have since recorded Aston Villa as well, some/all of these problems may also apply to it.

I think the low audio level problem might be the hardest to resolve; I'll do some testing tonight. I suppose I can always use the "Amplify" function. Incidentally, I think the scraping/hissing noises I used to have were caused by a loose connection in the microphone socket on the old computer - the new one fits tightly, so these should no longer be an issue.

Anyway, I'll resubmit S&C when I've done as much as I can to it. I think I still have the uncompressed/unfiltered raw file to work with, which will help. Hassocks5489 11:56, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

New version of S&C uploaded just now (same filename), in Mono and with amplification. I had a look at the Aston Villa file, and thankfully that is in Mono as well. Hassocks5489 22:34, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. The new version still has two channels, the level is a little bit higher, and the encoded bit-rate is reduced (which is why the file is smaller). The Aston Villa recording has one channel, but is also low in level. More to this reply later ('scuse my tardiness; if I told you how long it takes me to write this stuff you'd probably fall off your chair laughing). :) -- Macropode 11:28, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

This is too weird ... I've just opened the file in Audacity, and yep, it's still in stereo ... but I remember making all the changes you recommended. Aaaaaargh!! I must have done something daft and undone the changes, or something. Anyway, I've split the file again, resaved it and made sure it is in mono, so I'll upload that now... Hassocks5489 13:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC) — done. 21:34, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Excellent. One channel of very fine narration. (I'll update the review shortly). There's room for quite a lot more amplification yet, but I can hear noise reduction artifacts that would come up with it, although they'll come up anyway when the listener (whose name, by the way, is Glynis) turns up their speaker volume to hear your voice. Have a look at your recording in Audacity, and see all that empty space above and below the blue trace. That's all unused room that your voice could be taking up! If we could just improve your technical quality a wee bit so it does full justice to your narration...

To address some of your earlier comments:

Firstly, thank you for providing a detailed account of your experiences. The more I can learn about the difficulties people are having with recording, the better I can (try to) help with, at some stage, a jargon-free guide to recording Wikipedia articles with Audacity.

I don't think there's much, if anything, wrong with your microphone, age or lack of obscenely-expensive-studio-mic credibility notwithstanding. Many inexpensive mics work very well indeed for recording voice, although some do introduce a bit of undesirable noise. To say anything further at this point would just be speculating. Only if you want to go the extra mile with this, do the following:

• Make a short test recording. Say a few words, then leave a few seconds of silence, then stop recording. Don't noise reduce, amplify or anything else, I'd like to hear the raw, unprocessed audio.
• Make an Ogg Vorbis file out of it.
• Upload it (as a "new version") to Image:Spoken test recording.ogg. (I would have made this a link, but the wiki-wizards around here have rigged it so that all links to audio "image" pages get turned into little blue "play" buttons. Cute!)

It's good practice to always make your recording as loud as possible so the listener doesn't have to fiddle with their volume control to hear it. The correct way to do this is not to speak into the microphone more loudly, but, after you've finished recording and removed (edited out) the mistakes and bits you don't want, to apply something like Audacity's "Amplify" tool to the entire recording. Professionals would do something like this as a routine part of "post-production". It's a necessary step in turning a good narration into a finished, listenable recording.

The crackly hissy noises, which sounded very typical of a dry joint / bad connection have disappeared, along with your old computer. :) -- Macropode 12:47, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

It's definitely worth doing, so I'll record a short test file as you suggested and upload it tomorrow. For comparison, I've managed to retrieve (from the Recycle Bin) a raw snippet of audio recorded on the "old" computer _{(I wish it would disappear: I've now got two knackered base units and a CRT monitor in our spare room, with my Dad's old one to follow soon! ;))}; it's the GNU declaration I pasted on to the end each time. I think the difference in volume will be quite striking, suggesting it must be something to do with the settings on my new computer. The name of the "old" snippet is Original Ending Bit.ogg. Look out for these some time in the next 24 hours. Hassocks5489 22:16, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, here are the two files: (above) is raw audio from my old computer, and (above) is from my new one. As you will see on Audacity, the latter comes out remarkably quiet, with the trace being little more than a flat line. Hmmmmm...! Hassocks5489 21:22, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

You thought that was embarrassing? Now it gets really wierd. :) Make and upload another test recording, repeating the above procedure, but this time with your microphone un-plugged (it won't hurt your computer). Once this is done, before you plug the mic back in, give the metal contacts of the jack (plug) a light clean with a clean, dry cloth. Then plug the jack in and out (and in, of course) of the mic socket two or three times (no more) and see if all that 'orrible noise is still there when you record. -- Macropode 09:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh dear, I'm confused ...! Am I to record when the mike is unplugged, which would presumably show up any interference or noise not related to the mike; or am I doing a "before-and-after" recording, unplugging and cleaning the mike in between; or something else? I'm guessing the former, but that just seems a bit strange ... please confirm, just so I'm sure! (I'm probably trying to look too deeply into something obvious... :)) Hassocks5489 12:33, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

You pretty much got it with your first guess. There are two (probably related) problems with your "raw" recorded signal: it's low in level and it's noisy. The low level could be either software or hardware related, but the noise seems indicative of a hardware issue. Divide and conquer! We're basically trying to isolate the source of the noise. My guess at this stage is that when you make a recording with the mic un-plugged, you'll get (effectively) blissful silence, with any noise being at an extremely low-level. If this is the case, the next step is to try another microphone (there's a possible explanation as to why your current mic seemed to work reasonably well with your old computer). I want to hear that silence before I recommend that you spend money on new hardware (although mics that will do the job well are quite inexpensive, and should be easy to obtain from any computer shop worth their salt).

There's no need to upload before-and-after recordings. Anytime you've got noise and low signals in audio equipment, among the first suspects (and the easiest ones to verify) are the connectors. Clean them (not with anything abrasive) and you may solve your problem right there.

A note regarding microphones: If you decide to buy a new one, get a desk mic, you'll likely get better results from it. Headset mics are for sports commentators, on-line gamers and pop performers who want to look like they're not miming. There are various types of microphones. Get one that's specifically designed to work with a computer and you probably won't go far wrong. -- Macropode 08:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Awesome; I understand now. I'll upload one file showing what happens when it is unplugged, and one with some test audio after I've cleaned the contacts, just to see if that does indeed cure the problem. If not, a new microphone will be easy enough to pick up. Again, look out for these uploads within the next day or so. Hassocks5489 11:46, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

A caveat: Remote troubleshooting is rather awkward, and is a process of educated guesswork. In other words, I may well be wrong! -- Macropode 09:26, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Aston Villa FC

Just a quick note before I go to bed ... (11.30pm here!)

I have uploaded a new version of the AVFC recording, with significant amplification and as much noise reduction as I could manage without causing the words to start "eroding". The result isn't ideal, but as you said, at least it's louder. :)

Recording with the mike unplugged was troublesome: the program didn't let me do it first time. I'll try again tomorrrow. However, I did some recording with it plugged in but switched off, and the output was very "noisy". I'll fiddle around with things at the back of the computer and see if I get anywhere. (I have cleaned the jack with a cloth, BTW, so that possibility has been taken care of.) Hassocks5489 22:37, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Having done some fiddling around (ahem!) tonight, and tested the output in various ways, it does seem to be coming out a bit louder than was the case for the Shaw & Crompton and Aston Villa "originals", which is encouraging. I also compared the latest tests with "Cricket", for which I have recorded all of the raw audio but undertaken no editing; the difference is noticeable. Hopefully this should mean future recordings will not have to be amplified and "noise-reduced" as much, and will therefore sound more normal!! Hassocks5489 19:58, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Sounds encouraging. You should get into the habit of tinkering, it's one of the small joys in life! Speaking of which, haul out those knackered system boxes you mentioned earlier and pull all the bits out of them. I'd be surprised if you couldn't salvage enough good parts to build a complete working machine. -- Macropode 07:04, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Yet more thanks!

Hey, just wanted to thank you for the reviews of my spoken articles Julia Set and Prisoner's Dilemma - only read them today and has given me renewed vigour to get on to recording some more - bit easier now I'm back at Uni as well :) My only issue is I'd love to do some crazy article like Sobolev space but I think there's only about 100 people in the world that would actually read it! Here's to the project! JebJoya 23:53, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Cheers! While there are people such as yourself who enjoy making spoken Wikipedia articles, then this project will be here to facilitate that.

While the equations in Julia Set translated to spoken form quite nicely, I'm not so sure the same would be true of the more complex equations in Sobolev space. You're welcome to prove me wrong though, and if you do so the result might be a good little audio learning tool for students of mathematics. More importantly, do it if you enjoy it! -- Macropode 06:37, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

The article for Australia

Could you update the spoken article for Australia? The current one is too loud and not clear enough. Your recordings would be pretty much perfect for it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sagan The Great (talk • contribs) 01:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you

Hi there. I was just browsing around various talk pages which I've contributed to in the past, and came across Image_talk:En-Gilberto_Silva.ogg. It's an assessment of a spoken article which I recorded. Even though the assessment is over a year old, I basically just want to say thanks for doing it! For some reason, I hadn't seen it until now - maybe in the future you could inform the recorder of the audio file that you have done the assessment (assuming you still do assessments). Anyway, thanks again - maybe I'll re-record the Gilberto Silva article and make the improvements which you suggested in your assessment. Cheers. -GilbertoSilvaFan (talk) 11:14, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Charset malfunction

For some reason, you messed up the entire character set of Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant with this edit. I assume this wasn't intentional, but do you have any idea how this happened? Maybe you walked into another bug of the MediaWiki software. --bender235 (talk) 10:51, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

My apologies for the problem my edit of this article caused to the charset. It certainly wasn't intentional. My guess at the moment is that it's something to do with the web browser I used for this edit (and another one today, before I read your message). The browser is KDE's Konqueror, as implemented in Kubuntu 10.04. It seems to display a few characters incorrectly, but it hadn't occurred to me that this might cause problems with Wikipedia edits. I'll use Firefox for any future edits. Thanks for letting me know of the problem. Macropode

I'm not sure if it was Konqueror that produced the problem. Maybe you should report this at Wikipedia:Help desk or MediaWiki support desk, because as I said this could be a bug in the new MediaWiki software. --bender235 (talk) 01:16, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Konqueror seems to be implicated somehow, because I'm not seeing the same character display problem in Firefox. On the other hand, as far as I can tell at the moment, the problem only seems to occur with Wikipedia. I'll try to pin down the parameters of the problem a bit more and report it as you suggest. Macropode

Wrong, it's happening in Firefox too... To be more specific, what I'm seeing on Wikipedia pages is an occasional diamond-shaped character containing a question mark, usually (but not always) followed by ". I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to html stuff, but that suggests to me that the browser is probably encountering a character it doesn't know how to display. It seems highly likely that this problem is related to my inadvertently messing up the character set in the above-mentioned article. --Macropode

All http traffic here gets routed through a caching / filtering proxy. I'll need to rule that out as the cause of the problem to make sure I'm not wasting the time of the MediaWiki techies. (Just thinking out loud here for the benefit of anyone who's interested in this problem). --Macropode (talk) 04:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

When I bypass the proxy, Wikipedia pages display cleanly, with no unusual characters. The odd characters showing in downloaded pages with the proxy in-line are the same ones that appeared in the Fukushima article when I edited it. The lesson for me here is that I should have previewed the edit before saving it, but since it was only to correct a minor spelling mistake / typo ("breeched" to "breached"), I didn't think it necessary. I also should have only edited the relevant article section, instead of the whole article. I haven't been active on Wikipedia for a number of years, and I guess my editing skills are a little bit rusty. Interestingly, the proxy is exactly the same configuration as several years ago when I was last active on Wikipedia (albeit using later software versions now) and runs very widely used software, and I had no trouble with it then. I'll continue to investigate. --Macropode (talk) 06:21, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

It's almost certainly not an issue with the MediaWiki software. It appears that the hyphen character and a few non-English characters are being corrupted as they go through the local proxy here. It happens, but infrequently, when I load pages from websites running other software, which is probably why I haven't paid it much attention before. Once I do a bit more checking I'll likely be raising the issue with the developers of the proxy software. --Macropode (talk) 10:37, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

It turns out the proxy was mis-configured, but that was only half the problem. Macropode (talk) 05:39, 21 September 2011 (UTC)