Sound quality

From DoWire Wiki

We'd like to improve the quality of the audio served by Democaster whether it arrives via the Internet or telephone. We need to level the sound, filter out background noise, etc..

Enhancing what we have

We envision using a set of existing Linux tools with the server to enhance the audio clarity the end listener. Our goal is to offer lower bandwidth voice-oriented streams and downloadable files that give us the best quality at the lowest possible stream/download size. Luckily with voice, the KB per second for streams can be small enough to work on 28.8 modems, in places with relatively poor bandwidth, and even over wireless GPRS connections. This means that someone could use our recipe and install a linux desktop in a meeting room that could both encode and serve the audio to dozens of listeners.

WholeWheatRadio shares their audio processing tips that could be replicated on Linux. Podcasting on a Budget also offers good advice. [http://soniclear.com/ProductsVoiceBoost.html

Soniclear] applies proprietary voice boosting software in their Windows offerings that may be of interest.

Improving the sound that we gather

We plan to test a high quality speaker phone as well as experiment mixer with some professional microphones.

Any meeting room with a sound system or public address system could be connected to the line-in on a computer which would send sound up to the server via our envisioned event console.

Alternatively,RemoteMix would allow anyone to use quality microphones or an existing sound system to gather audio which could then be sent to server via a telephone line if no direct Internet connection exist.

Finally, the recording advice from Soniclear also includes a section on recording telephone conversations.