I don't know at this point whether I will create all the sound effects for my game or not... But for sentimental reasons I recorded a sound of a few birds in the woods in back of the house I use to live in...

I would really like to have a least one of the bird sounds in the game, however when I recorded it to the computer, there were a lot of noise for lack of a better word... It just didn't sound clear, there is a low constant scratching type sound that I would like to filter out. Is this possible? Any idea on how I can accomplish this?

Filtering out 'hiss' is always very difficult because it's multi-frequency. You might get away with a band pass or a band exlcude filter but generally, the trick is to avoid getting the hiss there in the first place.

If the problem lies with your original recording, you might try making another. If the hiss suddenly appears when you sample the recoridng, try to sample it again. Keep leads short, keep things digital if possible.

The good news is that most bird sounds are piercing and hiss sounds a bit like wind. The brain easily masks it.
If quiet and playing over music, you can probably get away with no filtering at all. Play a separate wind noise over the birds and it might hide any noise all together.

Mark

Also be sure to get the written permission of the birds in question. You don't want legal issues later on...

The hiss sound came from the original recording... I may try recording again, but I'll try adding winds sounds first.

As for the copyright issue for the bird sounds, I think I would hold that copyright, since I went out in the woods myself and recorded the bird sounds myself. :p

Can you suggest any type of hardware that would be good for recording a wide arrange of sounds in the woods, with minimal to zero hiss sounds? I'm willing to pay anywhere from $100 to $300 Canadian if it can get done what I want done with it.

I'm willing to pay anywhere from $100 to $300 Canadian

I'm afraid to say that's probably a bit low. Cheap gear and bad sound go pretty much hand in hand.

You could go with a MD recorder or similar, digital handicam, portable dat player... any convenient digital recorder you can get your hands on should be able to do a reasonable enough job on the recording side. Failing that, even an old analogue handicam will have better sound than an audio casette.

The main thing is to get yourself a nice microphone to plug into it - for recording birds in the woods you'd probably want one of those ones that they use in film and TV that look like a big hairy caterpillar (they're highly directional and wind-shielded). And believe it or not $300 Canadian won't actually get you very far in the microphone world.

When you record sound outside with an ordinary microphone, you are likely to get some horribly wind sound.
Although if that's not the kind of noise you are talking about, the constant background noise that you get is
easily filtered out with an audio program.
I use Audacity which is free. I think it's good, you can record and filter and convert between mp3/wav/ogg..

Congratulations Mickey!

For your sound enginering exersises you have chosen most of the difficult sounds to record in the nature - bird singing... :D
I don't know how to help you with issue (recording) without starting long master class. That's exactly the area where single microphone alone costs 1000 US$ and higher to have the appropriate results. Seriously...

On birds singing I'd really recommend you to walk around the Net, find some approriate resource and ask the permission to use few sounds from "their great and informative resourse". Or use some stupid synthesizer with bird sounds inside - most of peoples anyway don't know how real birds sound - because almost everything on TV and sound recordings are clean synthesizers...

The sound isn't a wind sound, because there was no wind the morning I went out to record the birds. I used sound forge to attempt to filter out the hissing sound... Which did work to some degree... However, I find that when the birds were singing you could hardly hear the hissing, but when all was quiet is when I heard the hissing the most.

So what I have decided to do is take small clips of each bird singing and have them randomly play throughout the game. The first test of this with two different birds chirping, sound great. I don't notice the hissing and it sounds more natural to hear them chirp at a random time then predicting the chirps by a looping track with hissing sounds.

The reason I did not want to purchase sounds from the internet, is because these sounds are very sentimental to me and important that I have them included in my project. Where I recorded these birds is where I remember spending most of my childhood. Thus, bringing back good 'ol memories when I play my game.

This way of using the sounds in the background above did work really quite well... However, I assume things will only become more difficult in adding the counstant cricket and frog sounds at night... But I'll deal with that when the time comes.

Thanks for your help :)

The hiss sounds that the recording picked up may come from the recording device itself, e.g. what you hear may be the tape drive's little motor spinning. When I record sounds with the built-in mic on my laptop, it picks up on the harddrive when it rattles. It helps to use an external microphone.

Also make sure to wear a good set of headphones (I love my Sennheiser) when you process your sounds. You'll hear much more that way! Something that may sound acceptable on external speakers (especially cheap PC ones) may sound a lot worse over headphones.

Note that for minidisc, most recording enthusiasts prefer Sharp to Sony because of the manual rec volume level by default but I use a sony MZN710 for portabe recording. There are some solid state recorders around now (it annoys me that the cheap ones could record CD quality if they wanted to but prefer to a hours of mp3 or other rubbish quality). Good solid state can rival DAT in price I think.

Get a condenser mic. Search around and get the most expensive within your budget.

Mark

use a noisegate to remove the hiss sound when the birds aren't singing. I'd say soundforge would have one and audicity would have one too.
The other cleanup solution is a noisemap program like Dart Pro which takes a snapshot of the noise and intelligently removes it from the rest of the soudn. It works surprisingly well.

Just make sure you're recording device has manual record levels as the automatic ones will increase the wind and noise when the main sound isn't 'sounding' :)