Topic: Working with a soft recording

[alienbobz]

Trying to finish an older show. Levels are way soft. I think the biggest peak is in the -20's, which is from the audience. The music is at least -10db. The problem is that I have tried two ways. I have tried to compress it first, then normalized. Dead air/analog sound is very present on whole recording. Decided to try to normalize first, then compress, then normalize again. Same thing with the dead air. Guessing it is impossible to make this recording good without have some dead air. I am thinking about trying one method that I saw in another post (applying compress only to the audience), but I wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions. Let me know if you can help.

Jarod

[Brian Skalinder]

Have you tried sparingly using noise reduction?  It's easy to royally screw up a recording, but if done properly can make a big difference.

[F.O.Bean]

yeah, di recomend the de-noiser in wavelab, it has saved some recordings and made them very nice

[alienbobz]

Have you tried sparingly using noise reduction?  It's easy to royally screw up a recording, but if done properly can make a big difference.

Haven't tried that yet. Should I do that first, then normalize? Also, just to be clear on my first post, the music is -10db softer than the audience.

If the compress thing the same as noise reduction? If not, anyone know where it would be on soundforge? Thanks for the help.

Jarod