Whelp, wave one/two are mostly past us, and so far, we’re still up! We had three short outages overnight, but nothing the UPSes couldn’t handle – the longest was about 10 seconds long, nothing actually serious.

Tonight could get dicey in the early afternoon; tomorrow afternoon, though, will be the biggest event. It’s a separate system, we aren’t in some kind of eye; Songda doesn’t have an eye any more, and is continuing to weaken. They’re thinking more “2006” than “1962” at this point, so those winds will most likely top out in the 90-100kph range.

Still, in 2006, we lost power for two days, and neighbours lost theirs for nine. So it’s still to be taken seriously.

I’m still working on a project for some people in Great Big Sea fandom, helping them recover a badly-degraded cassette recording of a concert from 1993. It’s… wow yeah, it’s a mess. Definitely one of those, “I’ve got this to the point where it’s… pretty bad! But here, listen to the original for comparison…” projects. I think I’ve managed to make wide sections of it listenable, in that you can make out lyrics pretty much all of the time now, you can hear choruses, the weird continuous rumble is gone, the particularly fierce for some reason tape hiss is gone, things like that. But damn, the distortion is pretty fierce at times. I’m pretty sure they were overdriving the microphone.

Here’s the plugin stack, from memory:

• repetitive noise reduction (-18db)
• MASSIVE LEVELS AUTOMATION OH MY GOD YOU DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW
• low pass filter (more hiss)
• high pass filter (rumble)
• 10-band bandwidth-adjustable equalisation (with deeply gnarly settings, this was not a good recording)
• multi-band compressor (to reduce crowd noise as percentage of signal)
  right about here it starts to sound like a normal, if low-quality, recording
• second 10-band bandwidth-adjustable equalisation (basic general EQ)
• second low pass filter (because asymmetrical EQ curves aren’t a thing)
• standard compressor (oh look something almost normal!)
• 20-band notch equaliser (fixing dents in the curve, I thought, “let’s try this” and it worked)
• some very short-duration reverb to hide many remaining sins (waveform smoothing)
• fast look-ahead limiter on master bus (kind of a circuit breaker, for peak protection, should do absolutely nothing) and done.

It’s kind of a lot. The automation in particular is pretty hilarious – the recorder had automatic recording level adjust and they used it (NEVER USE THAT) and I’m kind of undoing all of that the best I can. I’m also fixing dropouts, stuff like that.

(Seriously, never use automatic recording level, I’m pulling entire lines of songs back out of noise.)

If any audio engineer is reading this: I know. I know. But I can’t combine those EQ passes, I tried – the processing between them matters too much. And of course, this is a no-pay project, because it’s fannish – but I volunteered, and every time I do one of these things, I learn something.

Okay, now we’re getting more power flickers, so let’s post this while we can still echo it around. Adventures!