Smoothing/improving voice speech files? [SOLVED]

[Play_Pretend]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here goes anyway!

Yesterday I recorded 240 lines of speech with the main voice actress for my game, Damsel.  I use a $20 mike from Walmart that has pretty good clarity, Audacity to record it, and exported all the files as OGGs.

They came out really soft volume-wise, so as a test I used Audacity to give a few of them a +27 decibel gain, so they can be heard clearly over the background music.  And I trimmed off the unnecessary silences at each end.

I plugged in those few files, and in-game they all tend to make a slight popping noise at the start and finish, and the background music goes more quiet.  It's like they're forcing themselves in over the music.  Whereas when I listen to other AGS games with speech (Jessica Plunkenstein, for instance), the voices just lay smoothly over the music, with no pops at either end.

For instance, this is the original recording:
http://www.box.net/shared/re4kp3my8s

And then with the volume up and the ends trimmed:
http://www.box.net/shared/c16m9fqqil

Is there any way to edit these to make them lay smoothly?  Or is it already too late, thanks to my cheap mike or recording too softly?  Any help is appreciated, I'm a sound editing newbie!   Thanks!

[Fade to White]

I'm pretty sure both of the problems (deadening the music and the popping) are being caused by the background hiss in your sound files. I loaded the louder volume recording into Audacity and applied a noise removal filter to it and trimmed a pop off the end, give it a try to see if it works now.

Edited file

If that's the problem, then all you should need is to apply noise removal to the files using Audacity and trim off any errant pops. Just be careful to not to overdo the noise reduction as it can muddy the overall quality of the sound file.

[Play_Pretend]

Thanks!  It took care of the popping problem just great, but it seems to be deadening the music even more now.  Does that always happen and I just never noticed before?

[TwinMoon]

Hey SV!

If by deadening you mean that the music volume drops, you can change it with game.speech_music_drop.

The default is 60, if you want no volume drop, put

Code: ags

game.speech_music_drop = 0;

in game_start().

[Fade to White]

Ah, sorry for misleading you about the volume shifting, I didn't realise that AGS automatically drops the background volume when playing speech. TwinMoon's suggestion will fix your problem.

[Play_Pretend]

Oh, cool!  I just tried it and it did fix the problem...even on the old, un-noise-removed files the pops are barely audible now (I'll still fix them though).  Thanks a ton guys!