The noise in your recording environment in addition to the noise in your recording equipment adds up to what is called the noise floor. Let's explore how to measure this. Understand what an acceptable noise floor level might be.

And understand what a signal chain is and how to use it to systematically reduce the noise floor.

And there's just enough time to explore what room tone is and why it should be captured in all your recordings.

Note: my experiment at the end of the recording didn't work. It didn't sound as jarring because Auphonic.com cleaned up the noise so well in the rest of the tape that the gaps had no impact!!! Oh well. Try the experiment for yourself (before running your tape through Auphonic).

PRODUCTION NOTES

Recording Mic: Zoom LMF-2 Lavalier mic

Recording device : Zoom F2 32 bit float Field Recorder

Recording location: Standing into my closet

Recording format: WAV (32 bit float mono)

Sample rate: 44100Hz

Editing app: Audacity

Sound Treatment: Auphonic Productions at Auphonic.com

Auphonic.com settings [to output as a 16bit mono WAV file]: Adaptive Leveler (on), Loudness Normalization (Loudness Target -19 LUFS ), Filtering (on), Noise and Hum Reduction (Reduction Amount: Auto), Sample rate: 44.1kHz

I uploaded the resulting WAV file to Anchor.fm to host the file and added the music from their free music stock.

Episode art: Canva

Anchor automatically converts the WAV file into a 128kbps .m4a file