Horrendous noise when recording/converting 8 bit for HL dialogue? Created 4 years ago2020-05-25 20:36:21 UTC by hermanJnr.

HL uses 8-bit PCM Mono tracks for dialogue. To this end I wanted to record some lines, but my God the distortion and noise I'm getting is nothing short of horrendous.

I can record a 16 bit Wav and there's no distortion at all, even at high volume. Then I use Audacity to convert it to 8 bit and it sounds like the microphone is being run over by a truck, you literally can't even hear my voice over distortion.

Then I tried directly recording an 8 bit file with a patched old version of Windows XP Sound Recorder. You can literally see the massive distortion spikes as I'm talking and the result is the same.

Any idea what is causing this? I can talk all day on modern VOIP or record 16 bit sound and it's crystal clear, but then 8 bit is just...awful

Any help appreciated, thank you guys.

Solved this! Couldn't delete the thread, so just posting the solution here in case it's helpful to anyone in the future.

Basically the issue was with massive amplification of minute amounts of background noise. This was fixed by altering my mic sensitivity (the drivers were missing, so this option wasn't there before).

Also there were problems with Audacity that were fixed with another update. On top of all that, it turns out that HL supports 22k Hz audio, whereas I previously thought it was only 11k. This made a big difference again and reduced the noise.

Finally I made liberal use of Noise Reduction inside Audacity to fix any remaining issues. Audio isn't perfect but it isn't bad.

Thanks all.

Glad you solved it, but yeah. When it comes to audio, record in high quality, then kill the background noise and compress the clean recording down to 22k Hz.