Hi Doug,
I am very grateful for the length and detail of your reply... Thank you! As I just mentioned in my reply to stiiv, I am quite the newbie, so forgive my ignorance of the basics. Here are my answers to your follow-up questions:
1) The sound is distorted within GoldWave itself.
2) I've tried experimenting with the volume effect filter, but can't make good progress on imoproving the quality. If it helps, the default evaluation of the sound shows left/right current maximums of: .3411 (-9.34dB)
3) It's great you provided me with links to alternate tools & how to use them... The VLC info was seemed the easiest and most direct, since that's where I'm successfully playing the movie to optimal sound begin with and it would seem most logical to grab the audio in that proven environment, at source. However, while I did find the option to convert, it was titled slightly differently from the explanatory link you provided and didn't seem to do anything for me when I tried to use it. Here's what I did in VLC:
a) Menu option: MEDIA... ADVANCED OPEN FILE...
b) <ADD> button...
c) [x] Show More Options
d) Clicked the button that looks like a "V" at the bottom of the window, beside the <PLAY> button, which reveals a combo box & selected "Convert"
e) In the resulting pop-up:
- I typed destination c:\test.mp3
- [x] display the output
-Settings Profile changed to: Audio-MP3
and then I clicked <START>... but nothing happens, besides streaming the file in the viewer (no .mp3 generated)
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4) Again, like for Stiiv's reply to me, I don't know how to tell what is in the AVI "container"/"wrapper" ... how do I look at this "FourCC" code in the avi header? What tool will let me uncover what's contained within?
5) Thanks for outlining where the lossy-ness happens during compression & not de-compression - I appreciated every tidbit of your note!
DougDbug wrote:Is the sound distorted when you open and play it in GoldWave, or only after you re-save it?
Here's something you can try - Open the original AVI file and
Effect -> Volume -> Volume Maximize. A window will pop-up showing the current maximum. If it's over 1.0 (0dB) you may be getting clipping (distortion). If you're going over 0dB, click OK and
Maximize will buring the peak level
down to 0dB if necessary.
I'm sure there is a way to extract the audio with results identical to what you get with VLC. In fact, there may be a way to extract the audio with VLC. I've never tried it, but I found
this. You can also try
SUPER (FREE!!!) or
AoA Audio Extractor (FREE!!!). I use SUPER (it's kind-of a screwy program, but it's got me out of trouble a few times). I've never tried AoA Audio Extractor.
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FYI - "AVI" is a "container" or "wrapper" format and it can contain audio & video in an infinite number of compression formats &combinations. In the AVI file header there is something called the "FourCC" code that tells the player software what CODEC to use.
It's likely that you have a format that's not directly supported by GoldWave, and you have a 3rd party CODEC is not working properly.
If everything's working properly... In theory... You should not get any additional loss/distortion when you open (
decode/
decompress) the audio. Since most formats used with AVI are "lossy" compression, you can loose quality when you save or re-save... The data/quality is lost during compression,
not during decompression.