Audio questions

Technical 3D Animation and Competition
1

I have a few questions I wanted to ask the community here before we go ahead and submit an imperfect file over at FIRSTbase.

First, am I missing something in the rules that tells us what kind of compression to use for our audio? I’ve been assuming no mention meant uncompressed audio.

Second, does anyone know of a program that will check our audio to show us that it is in fact within the -18 to -6 dB range?

And finally, in case our animation ISN’T in that range, any suggestions for a program that will normalize an audio track to that range?

Thanks in advance,
Team 11 MORT

2

We use an old version of CoolEdit 2000, a pretty good, pretty cheap sound editing program you can download & try for free.

3

Thanks for the help, Kevin342. It looks like CoolEdit2000 has since been bought by Adobe and released as Adobe Audition. Adobe also has a video-minded audio application in public beta right now called SoundBooth. I’ll be giving all three of these programs a shot in the coming days.

4

Use Audacity!

Audacity is an open-source cross-platform audio editor with a load of plugins and effects and editing stuff.

I used it to slice and dice the narration for our animation so that it fit (just barely) in the animation.

It’s truly awesome.

Remember this: 0db is the loudest possible and -6 is the loudest allowed. This is not usually enforced (i.e., they won’t DQ your animation for having audio that’s a little over -6 db).