Topic: What can be done to clean up this recording of my grandpa

[crossthreaded]

I made this recording a while ago of my grandpa and there is some clipping and some other noise in the recording.  I would really like to get this cleaned up and sent out to my family sometime this month. 

What can I do in audacity to clean up this file?

This is what it looks like



and here is a sample from 12:45-14:00, so it matches up with the area in the photograph.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0DSRO6LH

any help would be greatly appreciated.



When I split the track up into a stereo track there is some kind of thumping in the right channel, it doesn't sound bad through just the right channel minus the thumping.  I can isolate that track and upload it if you want to hear that.

[page]

running a HPF on it to drop stuff under 200hz will help some, but you still have clipping... audacity's clip fix sort of blows, and I tried a couple other things but the HPF did the most benefit overall and that wasn't much.

you could do a quick fade out/in and just say there was equipment failure in that section there.

[crossthreaded]

is there another program that would work better?  I have access to protools and anything else pretty much

thanks man

[morst]

you could do a quick fade out/in and just say there was equipment failure in that section there.

That's a rather severe source issue there. Not much you can do on the error parts, but you do some left-right channel swapping to the extent that it's possible with the volume difference in left & right channels. Or just transcribe the words of the glitchy part, and edit it out, like page says.

I guess if you limited the living hell out of it, it would bring up the voice enough that it might be more audible. This is not music, you don't have to be dynamic. OK let me see what happens.

OK here's my test:
AppleAUPeakLimiter settings - attack time (shortest), release time (.005 sec), Pregain (I tried 33dB), and it made the voice sound good, except in the messed up parts which just sounded kinda muted.
It's bad, but not speaker-blowing. You could give it to the family as a bonus track??

[crossthreaded]

well shit.  let me upload a sample of just the right channel tomorrow. the peaking and such occured throughout the recording so it isn'tjust during that part.

I didn't have any lapel mics so I did the best I could at the time with my equipment.  It was hard to ge the levels high enough to pick up everything and not peak. 

[morst]

It was hard to ge the levels high enough to pick up everything and not peak.

Reality has a much higher dynamic range than our gear does. This stuff isn't rocket science, but neither is it a slam-dunk.

What do you think caused the overloading? Was that just over-levels, or microphone handling noise, or cable problems? In fact, what gear was used for this?

[crossthreaded]

it was just the way my granpa was talking I believe.  He was pretty quiet except for a few words he emphasized.

This was done with sp c4's into a busman mod marantz 670

[zowie]

diamondcut usually works well for this sort of thing