Tech Tuesday: Goldwave

So, you have to record a lecture, make it as clear as possible, and cut out that bit where you lost your train of thought and started rambling about typos in your lecture notes. What do you do? Well, you just pull up a voice recorder app on your phone…

Or not.

All of the convenience of phones and flashy apps can be deceptive. I’m no audiophile or recording expert, but I know enough to see that you need to use good hardware and good software to get the job done. Recording is not as simple as it seems. The audio can fluctuate dramatically, for example, based on how far you are from the microphone, and you need both to minimize differences in how the sound is picked up and to iron out any irregularities in the recording.

Assuming that, like me, you can’t go back to school to study sound recording technology, I recommend Goldwave. It’s a piece of software that has been around since 1993—almost 30 years!—and I have been using it almost as long as that. My brother introduced it to me. It’s essentially shareware (that’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time…), but you can pay for the full version to avoid nag screens. After trying it out for a good 20 years, I finally paid for the full version because I had the money and I knew that the developer deserved it for making such a fine product.

Being an older piece of software means, on the one hand, complexity: it includes a broad range of options, tools, and filters, so that you can do so much with just one piece of software. On the other hand, this also means that it can seem a bit complicated at first. The interface follows older conventions, and it does not do a lot of hand-holding. Still, for an academic it’s not too hard to pick up, even if you aren’t an audio expert.

Perhaps best of all, it offers complex batch processing features. I just downloaded a huge set of uncompressed royalty-free music in WAV format, which I can use within my PowerPoint lectures. With a few clicks, I was able to convert all of them to lossless compressed FLAC files to save space.

Similarly, Goldwave helps with some of the challenges of recording lectures on PowerPoint. When recording directly into it, PowerPoint plays with the gain settings of the microphone, and there’s no way to change that. Sometimes it turns the gain up too high at the start of the recording, then lowers it when you start talking, so the first syllable you say sounds like you’re screaming. “HELlo class…” “SPEAKing of mysticism…” In response, I made a batch processing script for Goldwave that automatically unpacks my PowerPoint presentations, fixes all of the voice recordings to iron out such dramatic fluctuations, and even lowers the pitch of my voice just slightly to make me sound for professorly. After that, it packs the files back up into the PowerPoint. It’s so easy, I don’t even have to fiddle with any settings. I just run the command, and Goldwave does the rest.

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