Doing Post-Production on Audio Recorded at a Live Event

Because most Live event staff members aren’t experienced audio producers (including the guy sitting next to the mixing board at the back of the room), many times the recordings you receive afterwards are very sub par. And you will usually receive a mono MP3 file containing all the speakers voices already mixed together! Yay. Or, actually you will receive a stereo file with the same exact audio on both left and right (taking up twice the file size for no reason).

There can be lots of problems with the recording:

• Participants voices at different volume levels
• Applause way too loud
• Levels all over the place
• Questions from audience way low
• Nasty sibilance on one speaker but not the others
• Noise from air conditioners, lights, etc.
• Reverb from the room itself

And your job is to fix all that – congratulations!

Side note: In advance I always ask for multitrack recordings from the event folks but they are never set up to record multitrack. In fact, these days I consider it a huge win to get one mono that’s recorded at a decent level and isn’t too noisy.

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