who else here modifies their music?

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Less number of songs.

I have about 6900 songs now. Without these modifications my collection would be about 7500. Plus some of the songs don't have proper gaps, despite setting "gapless album" on iTunes. And it annoys me when a "skit" appears in your shuffle.

I modify my music in a different and more drastic way than has been mentioned. I make something I call Plasma, which is mostly a pause-button collage form. The primary form it takes, other than freestyle mishmash, is recording a song to tape while pressing the pause button IN TIME to the music, creating an odd fractal song which is shorter, makes no lyrical sense (often humorously), yet has a beat and retains the precise timbre of the ensemble. Simple pop and rock tunes make the best source material but I have ranged as far as jazz fusion and barbershop quartet, often with hilarious results. I have recorded dozens of hours of this stuff, and it has grown on me; some of the movements and changes I have created move me as deeply as any of the untainted music I listen to.

wow, that is very "avant-garde." maybe you might consider posting some of it on youtube?

That does sound interesting, I'd like to hear some.

i guess that could be called helter skelter musical arrangement, like the kidnap letters made up of clipped bits of newsprint. dickie goodman did something a bit like that with his "break-in" records which consisted of fake topical news interviews with folk currently in the news, and he'd insert little sound-bite excerpts of songs with the artists' singing pointedly specific bits of lyric as an "answer" to the questions being asked by the fake reporter.

anybody here on WP who has tried their hand at signature-based noise reduction can attest to the fact that extreme settings can make the denoised result sound pretty weird, with "star wars" type metallic grating artifacts known as aliasing. what i sometimes like to do with those artifacts is make an inverse subtraction copy leaving in only the aliasing and maybe a bit of music for rhythmic tracking purposes. then i take this noise and filter it further so that all that is left is just the metallic grating, which i then filter through things like AM ring modulators and FM exciters and such to get even weirder sounds.

i am on my 3rd attempt at restoring what columbia/sony put out in 1999, a supposedly "remastered" 2-CD album of Benny Goodman [and his all-star band] 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, which was recorded originally on 12" transcription discs which were worn and very noisy. the producer for this third reissue, Phil Schaap, decided that ANY noise reduction techniques would take away from the music. at first i thought he was all wet, so i ran it through my CEDAR DC-1 Declicker, and LO and BEHOLD the CEDAR unit chopped the music into mush. drat. so Phil was only partially wet.
so i put it on my computer the first time and made a paperweight. i put it on the computer a second time about 6 years ago, and spent several months trying to get it right, and it sounds OK but nowhere near as musical [sans the clicks and pops] as the original disk. so now i am working at it a third time, and THIS TIME i will succeed at making it listenably quiet [sans crackling and hissing and rumbling] but with the full sonic snap and clarity of the original recording. it is just that Schaap's reissue is so damned noisy, it is just such a glare of clicks and crackle that hearing the music is like trying to watch TV with somebody shining a flashlight in my face. it can be done but it is much work, and i am lazy so ironically i am hard at work with this project. wish me luck y'all.

Wow.

you're into a kind of classical version of "turntablism" - the art of manipulating records at dance parties and clubs that some deejays do. An art the lead to hip hop, and also lead to the current fad of 'mashups" (mixing to prerecorded rock songs - the deejay analog to musicians doing "medleys" of two or more songs).

Im a party deejay but I dont actually beat match nor scratch in public.

But i do manupilate records in private at home.

One dumb simple accidental musical discovery was to play a vinyl of Joe Jackson's eighties hit "Breaking Us In Two" at 45 instead of 33 rpm by mistake.

Its sounded just as great at the wrong speed- but completely different in emotional tone.

At the right speed its a whistful love ballad. At 45 its a booty shaking piece of Latin Salsa! If you have a vinyl copy of "Night and Day" you oughta try it.

I do a public access radio show on local cable TV.

On one show I accidently turned Bill Cosby into a rapper.

I played a recording of his early seventies classic about "Street Football".

I decided to set off his monoloque with some instrumental music - to give it a little energy. I choose a funky jazzy hit by Earth Wind and Fire( Sweetback's Theme) that even starts with a police siren sound effect- music that would further the retro urban mood of the comedy record.

The music was supposed to set off bill cosby- the listener wasnt supposed to consciously hear the music background.
But the music was too attention grabbing- but instead of fighting cosby the music and his voice meshed together in a rather pleasing way- it sounded the latest hit by Kanye West.
Not the effect I was going for. But interesting.

gosh, i can't really say that i do any of that. i just like listening to my old-timey music without the old-timey noise and distortions. that is what got me into using computers in the first place.

Thats another issue ive wrested with also.

First came burning vinyls onto CD's using a freestanding CD burner. More recently ive taken to feeding the audios from those CD's into this computer amd messing with the audio in sound studio.

If its in mint condition a vinyl it will sound great when burned onto a CD- and be preserved in digital before dust ware and decay get to it. But as you know if the vinyl aint in mint condition the digital copy - well- lets put it this way: CD burners enhance every part of the sound- but they especially enhance the treble end.

What do all of the flaws on a vinyl record tend to have in common ( the hisses and scratches and other surface noice)?

They are all entirely on the TREBLE end of the spectrum. So a cd burner, or other digital device, will tend to enhance the records flaws even more than it enhances its beauty.
In my experience on the digital copy of a vinyl the surface noise will leap out atcha far more than it does on the original record.

You can try feeding the sound through an equalizer (either a real equalizer on a deejay console or hi fi set) or through a virtual equalizer ( on a computer screen) with the bass and midrange frequencies set high and the treble pots set low. Both virtual and actual equalizers work about equally well in my experience.
They do reduce the surface noise, but like you were saying, it also takes something away from the music. It becomes kinda muddy and faraway sounding.

Its often a toss up which is worse: the cure or the disease.

There may be software out there that cures the problem - cleans up a vinyl's sound without reducing its presence, but havent stumbled across it yet.

oh my good man, there IS such software that i have been using [in one form or another] for the past 15 years. they are as follows-

SoundForge - the most stable audio editor that i have found, and the most versatile. i can do magic with this.

Dcart Millenium - a bargain-priced digital audio toolbox.
DartproXP- very good hiss reduction and glitch editing.
Virtos Noise Wizard NR tools- the best declicker for the money i have found, plus a very useful aural exciter.

Sound Laundry- the best broadband denoiser i have found, it lets me hear what i have taken out.

Acon Digital Media Noise Reduction Tools- a bargain price but must be used with care. has a neat treble spectral enhancement tool.

Sonic Foundry [now Sony] NR tools- a pretty fair declicker for spot-repairs, easier to use than a similar utility in DartProXP.

Pristine Sounds 2000- a unique frequency space editor lets me paint-out or erase audio glitches, a top-notch rumble suppressor and a very spacious high-quality reverb utility.

Munoise- FREE and GREAT dehisser that also has a noise-subtraction mode. the best dehisser i have found.

CEDAR DC-1 Declicker- an irreplaceable tool for artifact-free [except on low brasses] declicking and coarse decrackling of phonographic media. audio goes in clicky, comes out click-free, for the most part. but large pops are beyond its abilities, these must still be manually dealt-with on a wave editor.

Roland SN-550 Digital Noise Suppressor- i use this for cassettes that i am too lazy to digitize, it is an in-and-out thing that you put hissy audio in and it comes out with much less hiss, and it kills hum without killing the bass. very useful, if used with care.

PSP Stereo Audio Tools- lets me control and modify a stereo program's spread and coherence.

Magix Sound Cleaner 10- for its price, it is the only one with a bona-fide Spectral Editor, that lets me ID a cough or chair squeek or car horn or other such extraneous noise and remove it without audible seams, the algorithm replaces the noise with extrapolated audio from around the disturbance. there are other programs out there that do this but they cost at least a thou$$$$and more.

with the exception of SoundForge, these are all amateur audio editing tools that are reasonably priced. the profesionals use some fancier and quite expensive tools, such as-

Pro Tools [Digidesign]- the professional standard audio editing platform.
Sonic Solutions No-Noise- the industry standard Noise Reduction toolkit for Sonic System equipment.
CEDAR [Cambridge Audio]- Computer-Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration- a competing suite of audio repair tools that can do some amazing things, within limits of the skill of the audio engineer who uses them. aside from declicking/decrackling/denoising, there is also their own implementation of Spectral Repair in a fancier and more precise implementation than the Magix Sound Cleaner that i described above. in-house, they also can unkink recordings thoroughly warped with severe wow and flutter, digitally straightening the pitch- truly amazing and unique to CEDAR. i can correct moderate wow using SoundForge but not flutter, so this is something i'd like to have if i ever win the lotto.
there is yet another competing audio platform called AudioCube that is gaining lots of professional users. also very expensive. there is also SADIE and CREAMWARE and several others, also expensive and frankly not meant for "end users."

The only modification I do to my music is make ringtones of them in Audacity.

the whole ringtones thing is way more advanced than i can hack. audio restoration just seems simpler to me. sometimes arduous but ultimately simpler.

I recently got the Brian Wilson version of Smile, it's not bad but to be honest I prefer the bootleg version- the original 'Good Vibrations' is definitely superior to the new recording! I'm thinking about assembling my own version of smile using songs from the official and the bootleg.

can you tell me what essential sonic qualities it is that you prefer about the bootleg version over the remastered reissue? just curious...

i recently finished my 4th attempt at restoring the sound of the 1938 recording of the benny goodman/allstars carnegie hall jazz concert. my first try was good for little more than a coaster. the 2nd and third tries each included a bit more ambience but otherwise sounded like they were under blankets. the 4th time was a charm.

the producer [phil schaap] of the 2000 sony reissue of this classic recording, decided that no noise reduction would be attempted, so it was presented as-is, with incessantly dense crackling and rumble and hiss. it was his opinion that any real music lover could simply mentally tune-out the noise. what a crock. it was barely listenable, and required much effort to endure the 2 CDs' worth of crackle. this classic music deserved so much better treatment. so i endeavored to make a much more listenable version, first by feeding it through a CEDAR declicker, which when turned up to a level sufficient to remove all the crackle, made mincemeat out of the brasses, this is this unit's singular flaw, its inability to discern brass instrument waverforms from crackle. so i turned it down low sufficient that the largest clicks were removed without creaming the brasses, then i put it on the hard drive and used a brass-friendly algorithm to perform the rest of the decrackling. once this part was done, i could now hear basically all of drummer gene krupa's amazingly facile wire brush work on the cymbals and snares. next, i re-EQ'd the recording so that the telephonic tinniness [characteristic of 30s-era 78 rpm transcription disc recordings such as those used for recording this concert] was ameliorated, and some warmth added. next, i separated noise from signal, so i could determine how much actual usable treble was on top- it topped out at roughly 10,000 cycles or so, but when i just lopped off all above that point, it sounded like pitched noise, so i had to use a very gentle slope at a higher corner frequency, leaving in a bit more treble grunge, which i filtered out with a FREE and truly excellent dehisser program called MUNOISE. [google it]. then i suppressed the rumble/groove roar, corrected the occasional loud thump, decorrelated it with a subtle but spacious artificial stereo ambience, then made a CD out of it.

i believe this version has all the ambience of the original but with none of the obnoxious crackling and much reduced surface noise in general.