Frustrating night tonight… I was doing the post-production on a Blue Box Special Edition podcast of the 90-minute workshop that I did along with podcast co-host Jonathan Zar and security researcher Shawn Merdinger out at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference last month.  Unfortunately, even though I’d jacked into the mixer provided at ETel (or perhaps because I was connected into the mixer), I wound up with an annoying buzz throughout the recording.   I can only guess that it was something with one of the audio components in the setup for the room out there at ETel.  I’ve seen a buzz be created by something as simple as a bad wire or a connector not fully inserted into a jack.  In any event, I wound up with a buzz.

Since I had solved (and blogged about) a similar issue before using Audacity, I spent literally a couple of hours trying to kill off the buzz.  I used hi-pass filters…. notch filters… equalizer effects… all sorts of things.  Searched the web, the Audacity wiki and more.  Unfortunately, this particular buzz seemed to be located right down on the end of the frequency spectrum where our voices are also located!  So when I used a high-pass filter to allow through only frequencies over, say, 300 Hertz, you could hear the effect on our voices.  If I moved the high-pass filter down to say 100 Hz, there was no impact on our voices, but the buzz was still at full strength.  Move it up to 500 or 600 Hz and the buzz was reduced… but so was the quality of our voices.

Wanting to get this episode posted today, I finally gave up and ran it as it was recorded, which was not overly appealing to me.  I always strive to have the highest audio quality possible, which is why I spend the time I do on post-production.  But in the end, there was just no way I could figure it out.  Perhaps with better tools… or more time… perhaps not.  Fun, fun, fun…