What happened with these waveforms???

Question

The image is from audacity, but all the work was done in Audition. These are 4 different tracks exported from multitrack. Yes, I've done compression and limiting on the second two tracks, and it sounds....  Well, it sounds ok. Okay enough.  But I'm curious. Why are the tracks at different levels? and why has the limiter hit the top of the second bit and the bottom of the third bit? I'm a newbie, so if you're willing to educate me, please not too technical? P.S. that white noise was done on purpose. If you care to hear: https://artpepper.bandcamp.com/track/episode-two-audiobook-straight-life

paulfigg · Accepted Answer

Audio is not exhibiting DC offset. Your waveforms are asymteric. This is caused by inherant (vocal) anomolies and/or subjective recording/processing methods and attributes. I've written about the significance of symetric waveforms and ultimatly the reconstitution of headroom - especially if the intent is to add gain by way of various methods. You can "correct" the anomoly by applying Phase Rotation. Some hardware processors feature a DeCorrelator option. Much the same (see the Wheatstone/Vorsis M1).

Note asymetric waveforms are not necessariliy bad. However in certain instances (especially when dealing with bumped up speech/spoken word) correction may be benificial.

Below is your audio after Phase Rotation

-paul

@produceNewMedia

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

On the face of it, the different levels look like DC shift but it's hard to tell really, because I'm not good at Audacity. Seeing the waveforms as Audition displays them would convey more sense to me. Posting some short example waveforms would be even better...

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