Sound activation recording, voice activation recording, song detection

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Sound Activation - Automatic Song Detection (At silence: Create new file)

Available feature in Easy Hi-Q Recorder - More Info.

Click Options

The Sound Activation feature can be used for different purposes, such as:

Automatic song detection when recording from streaming Internet audio, CD's, records, tapes or any other source. This method creates a new file for each song.
Sound monitoring that creates a new file for each new sound. This is useful for monitoring an area with a microphone, automatically recording phone calls, recording nature sounds, etc. And, if you have the Add Date-time option selected for file naming, the recordings will be automatically "date and time stamped" by the filename.
Sound monitoring that removes silence and saves all sounds to one file. This is useful for the same purposes mentioned above. It can also remove the silence created by the "buffering" pauses when recording streaming Internet audio or video sounds.

(Sound monitoring is also called Voice Activation or sometimes VOX).

To enable Sound Activation, put a check-mark in the Sound Activation check box. To turn it off, uncheck it. Turning it off disables all of the related controls, turning it on enables the controls. To use Sound Activation you must also either click Record or Set a Schedule to start this function.

To use Automatic Song Detection, turn on, (check-mark) Sound Activation and select the "At silence:" Create new file option. This will automatically start recordings when sound is detected. It will also stop recordings when silence is detected. At silence, a new file will be created and the recorder will wait for a new sound and will then start recording again.

If you have trouble using this feature please read below.

This information applies to all recording types even though LPs are mentioned.
The Automatic Song Detection, ("At silence:" Create new file), feature can be tricky to set up especially for LPs. It's because of varying background noise levels like hiss, pops and there can be differences between records too. Sound card background noise levels can vary quite a bit also.

It's best to start with the Default settings. In the Sound Activation area, click the Def button for defaults. Leave the time slider at 0.1.
Then experiment with the 2 dB sliders. Only make very minor adjustments from defaults. Extreme movements won't work.

Try moving the second slider up to about -36 dB.
Then test record near the end of a track to see if it starts a new recording where it should.
It takes some trial and error.

Here are some settings recently reported by a user that worked for his LPs;
Start dB slider at -31 and the Stop dB slider at -29.

To use Sound monitoring that creates a new file for each new sound, select the "At silence:" Create new file option. It's the same as Automatic Song Detection except that you would have a microphone, telephone adaptor or another device plugged in.

To use Sound monitoring that removes silence and saves all sounds to one file, select the "At silence:" Remove silence option. The recorder will only record when sound is present.

The three sliders in this section adjust the sensitivity to sound and silence. The default levels work well in most cases. The levels may need to be adjusted depending on the type of input source being used, background noise and the sound level of what you want to record.

Start sound level slider
This detects the sound level that needs to be present to start a recording. If the level is set too soft, you might be recording constantly. A softer level can be good for monitoring in some cases if not too low. If the level is set too loud, your recordings might get off to a late start or might not record at all.
Detect silence sliders
The left slider sets the sound level that is considered silence, to stop recordings. If the level is set too soft, silence might not be detected which would keep the recording going. If the level is set too loud, normal softer sound passages might get cut out and if Create new file is selected, you would be creating many files.
The right slider sets the amount of time to wait once the silence level is detected to consider it silence and stop recording. You can set it from 0.1, (1/10th of a second) to 3 seconds.

You can experiment with these levels to find out what works best for your particular application.

The Def button sets the three sensitivity sliders to their Default values.

Sound Activation can be used in conjunction with Auto-Split.