Post Production:

Following the recording session, I copy the files to my computer.  The post production steps which follow are important in making a satisfactory recording.  I use Sound Forge, originally made by Sony but now sold by Magix, and RX Advanced made by iZotope to edit the files, but you can do an adequate to excellent job with free audio editing software on the web.  The most well known of these products is Audacity.

The first step is to mark the beginnings and ends of the takes:

If you are burning a CD, you have to leave a little silence or unimportant audio before the beginning of the track.  CD players take some time to "unmute" as a track starts, and if you start the music exactly at the beginning of the track, the CD player  will "upcut" or chop off the first note or so when the listener plays the track.  Different players take different amounts of time to unmute, I have found leaving 0.350 second of silence (or fade in, if there is a lot of room noise) at the beginning of a track works with about any CD player.

If there is applause, I have to decide whether to leave it as a part of the take, or cut it out.  If I leave it, and it is more than about 7 to 10 seconds, I will mark the end at about that length, and later, after all other processing, fade it out at some point with the fade lasting two or three seconds.  If there is no applause, or short applause, I allow a second of "room tone" background sound after the decay of the last note or applause, to apply a quick fade after the track is processed.  You want to be careful to avoid chopping the end decay of the last note off, it sounds unnatural.  Let the note decay completely before ending the track.

I then listen carefully to the take(s) and perform any corrective work.  If it is an indoor recording, I may have to add some gentile EQ and/or reverb to adjust for poor room acoustics.  I sometimes use my restoration software (Izotope RX Advanced) to remove objectionable noises such as cars with noisy mufflers.  Modern editing software will allow you to remove or attenuate all kinds of extraneous noise, you have to decide if it is worth the time and if the result is worse sounding than the original.  I rescued recordings in a catering house in Brooklyn where there was a DJ in the next room with a hyperactive subwoofer, louder than the steelband.  It took many hours, and probably wasn't perfect, but made something listenable out of what was pretty bad. You should be aware that good restoration software, particularly with the spectrum editing I needed to excise the subwoofer's booms, does not come cheap, and here to a good degree you get what you pay for.

The next step in post is dynamics adjustment and normalization.  You may not know what normalization means.  It is adjusting the levels to the standard desired for release.  Historically, if you were making a CD. you normalized the track so the loudest peak was at 0dBFS, this means it was just at the point of clipping distortion.   If you take your raw recording and normalize it, you will probably find it plays back very softly.  You may think you have to apply a compressor to make it louder.  I rarely use a compressor on my tracks.  I want the full dynamic range of the original track, or at least the audible part of that dynamic range to be available to the listener.

There is more on Post Production on page 12