Cleaning up speech or lecture in Audacity

Something I learned today: I had an audio recording of a lecture for a class I had taken which was very poor in quality. I wanted it to sound better so I did some digging on audio cleanups for voice. What I ended up finding was a neat little feature in Audacity

Here is how to make it sound better:

Install Audacity and the LAME plugin for MP3s

Import the audio file in question

File > Apply Chain > CleanSpeech > Apply to Current Project

This will do a bunch of things. It will remove long pauses, clean up the range for human speech. It doesn't seem to remove echoing, but it is much better to listen to after running this quick plugin.

I had a hard time finding this, so I figure giving something back to the Google cause would be nice.

The original posting can be found HERE. The author goes into a little more detail on what it actually does.

Daylight saving

Today we fall back an hour. It is such a strange phenomenon, that of DST. We simultaneously change our clocks twice a year with the worry being that someone forgot to change theirs. I find it amazing that the world continues mostly unaffected by this change. Since it was originally done for farmers, in a society were less a percentage of people are farmers, why is it done anymore?

Thanksgiving blend at Starbucks

Just wanted to post that I had it this morning, Thanksgiving blend that is, and it tasted like a burrito. Adds a whole new meaning to the term "coffee beans"

That is all.

EDIT 2011-11-2
I got it again today lol

Engineers and programming

I met with my engineering advisor this afternoon to get a release number for registration tonight. I managed to speak with him briefly about programming as an engineer. I have a lot of interest in programming, as I do with engineering too. He explained his viewpoints on his as a lover of Fortran and from a practical standpoint that is makes you more marketable if you can program.

I am taking computer methods next semester (an engineering course) and the two professors who offer the course teach with two different pieces of software. One MathCAD and the other Matlab. My advisor recommended taking the Matlab version if I am already interested in programming as it would be easier, more relevant, and more marketable than the MathCAD version.

I will expand on this further at a later time

Full Star Wars Trilogy GIFs

A New Hope:

Empire Strikes Back:

Return of the Jedi:

In addition to these awesome GIFs, the old Telnet ASCII Star Wars still exists. While the awesome full color version exists on IPv6, most people dont have that. So if you were to go to a telnet client (if you have it installed you can just open up cmd.exe and type in telnet, otherwise go use PuTTY.)

Connect to this url: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

I hope you enjoy watching Star Wars in awesome ASCII!

Blogger page

I need a site to associate with python setup (not need, want). Since I lost my old domain this is a close second.

Sweet!!!