May 2005 Issue

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Audio Editing

The little use I have had for my computer during my illness has been for my usual job of recording to CD. From time to time I get sent recorded cassettes from a couple of music groups. The cassettes are usually of very old material recorded either from early recordings or from radio programs and are of a rare nature.

The cassette recordings are often noisy and the end of the songs interrupted by speech from a presenter.

My job is to clean up the recordings as best I can and get rid of the talking. Sometimes I have several copies of a track and I have to cut and paste back the best bits. The talk is a bit of a problem as by deleting it you lose a bit of the music. I get over this by fading the last few seconds of the music and so the missing bit is not noticed.

Clicks and pops can be eliminated individually if there are not too many. I find this the best method although the program I use will scan the track and eliminate them automatically. I feel that you lose a little quality if the automatic method is used.

Useful Tips?

I have been browsing a few old magazines this past month. Some of the news makes interesting and sometimes amusing reading. One example of this I gave in last month’s newsletter.

I might have written about this before, I can’t remember but browsing my old copies of Computer Active I came across what I thought was a very useful tip.

I often find that I have left the Caps lock on and have to delete a section and type it again. Computer Active says that if you want to change the case of a section, select it, hold down the shift key and press F3. Each time you press F3 the text will switch between title case, upper case and lower case.

It doesn’t work, at least not for me. Try it and see if it works for you.

I expect that everyone knows that when you delete something, you don’t actually completely delete it even after emptying the recycle bin. You actually mark it so that it does not appear. Even if the file is eventually overwritten it is still possible for the file to be recovered. This is still the case even if you reformat your hard drive and believe it or not files can sometimes be recovered even if you physically smash your hard drive.

It is not likely that you would wish to take such drastic measures to destroy files when selling your PC but if you did there is an easier way.

You can download a program called CyberScrubb.

Start Internet Explorer and type www.computeractive.co.uk/Download/1119531 and click Download Here. Once completed, double-click on the downloaded file (CyScrb-E.exe) and follow the installation instructions.