Recording1

Recording in the small booth

The small booth is a dedicated recording station. It has a boom-mounted mic that is always connected to Hyoid, a linux computer. Hyoid can be fully controlled either from within the booth or from the admin workstation to the left. This is intended to allow things like self recording or guided recording of a consultant.

This guide will help you:

  • restore the microphone to working order if some miscreant has fiddled with it.
  • create high quality recordings of yourself or a consultant, suitable for phonetic analysis and publication.
  • preview your recording on the headphones in the booth, on the speakers at the admin workstation, or both.
  • store data on Hyoid so it will be backed-up to the lab’s server2.
  • transfer data, using a USB flash drive, from Hyoid.

Figure 1: Mic in small booth

Getting started

  1. All Five cables need to be plugged in to the blue Cloud Pre-amp, and the Steinberg Audio Interface as shown above
  2. CHECK: are there
    • 3 circular XLR cables,
    • 1 squarish USB-B cable and
    • 1 audio cable
  3. All of these MUST be plugged in like this for recording to work.

Recording in Audacity

From the desktop screen click on the audacity icon

  1. Click on red circle icon near the top of the screen to start recording

    Command Button
    Record
    Pause
    Stop

  2. Click on the Pause button to pause the recording temporarily

  3. Click on the Square icon to Finish your recording

  4. Go to the Files menu

  5. Select Export Audio...

  6. Once you’re in the Export Audio window you need to do 3 things

    1. Make sure you’ve named your audio track

    2. Make sure that it’s saved as a .wav file

    3. Click Save to save it

    4. The file should be saved to the desktop and you can transfer it to your flash drive.

Recording in PRAAT3

  1. Open Praat
  2. Click on the new bar and select mono recording
  3. Once the Recording window is open be sure to:
    1. Record at a 44,100 Hz sampling rate
    2. Make sure the Imput source is Steinberg
  4. Click Record to start recording
  5. Click Stop to stop recording
  6. Add your recording to Praat’s Object list, click Save to list4
  7. To Save your recording to a file, you can export the file by going to the Save menu at the top of the screen and clicking Save as a 32 bit .WAV
  8. Name the file and then click Save.
  9. The file should be saved to the desktop and you can transfer it to your flash drive.

Putting files in a directory that will be backed up

The lab machines are backed up every night at 10pm, but your files will only be kept if they are in the Documents folder. Be sure to create a folder for yourself.

  1. Launch the file manager screen

  2. Open the Documents folder

  3. Create a folder with your first and last name

  4. Move your files here from the Desktop or they will be deleted later.

Writing files to a flash drive

The easiest way to get data from a lab machine to your own computer is a flash drive. There are several drives that belong to the lab and can be used to transfer data to your laptop: please do not take any of these drives out of the lab.

  1. Find the computer you are using. In the small booth this is Hyoid and it’s the large, black box on the table behind the pillar. There are USB ports on the top front.
  2. If it asks you to format the flash drive
    1. Make sure that you’ve Backed up all the data on the flash drive
    2. Format it as Fat (MS-DOS)
    3. Restore the data that was on the drive before the Format
    4. It should work now on all of the computers
  3. Click on the drive
  4. Drag and drop files onto your drive
  5. Eject the Flash drive

  1. originally by June Nielsen and Kevin McGowan, November 3 2016 ↩︎

  2. Rather than being summarily deleted, which is what will happen if you leave it on the desktop. ↩︎

  3. Praat can record audio and has a nice interface for monitoring recording levels (making sure you have a nice, clear signal that is not clipping) but we recommend recording with Audacity because it is more difficult to lose your recording data before it can be saved when recording with Audacity. ↩︎

  4. Be careful with the Save to list and close option. It is possible, if something goes wrong at this point, to lose recorded data this way. To be safe you should click Save to list, make sure it gets added to Praat’s object list, write the object out to a wav file, and then close the recording window. ↩︎