Topic: Random noise/chirping/artifacts in various parts of the recording

[panther65]

I patched into the board at a recent show and got some random chirping and  distortion in various spots during about 20 minutes of the recording. It came from the board as I've heard an alternate copy with the same artifacts. It's a bit tough to tell, but they seem to be from about 5k to 10k. Is there a way to at least tame these noises?
I  don't have a silent portion where the noises occur however. I use Audacity and Adobe Audition 3 but I have access to other programs.

http://rapidshare.com/files/87621087/sun_also_sets_distortion_16bit.wav.html

[John Kary]

Sounds like a bad cable on-stage.  Since you patched the board, and it sounds really faint, it was probably a bad wire to one of the monitors, and the crackling sound bled through to one of the mics.

Here's a trick to removing random little noise like that when using Waves X-Noise...  take a noise-print (Learn) off the unaffected audio of that song by letting the noise-reduction tool learn as much as possible over a similar sounding part of the song.  Then highlight the noisy part and process the noise-reduction plugin over the bad part--but set it in Difference mode.  The "good" audio should filter through, while the crackling is suppressed.

[panther65]

Thanks so much kuky for going to the trouble of listening to that. I will give that program a try.

[ironbut]

You have a PM. I hope this helps. Like I said, I think I could have gotten all of it if I'd been more careful and taken the time, but I just took a minute or two to let you know RX could fix it as if it was never there.

[panther65]

Thanks very much IB. I just noticed my PM. I screwed around with Izotope, but it seemed there were so many instances of these abnormalities that it would be hard to get rid of them. It's a great program and I will continue to experiment with it.
I put a box around what appeared to be the noise and attenuated. Should I do it differently?

[panther65]

Many thanks to IB for suggesting this outstanding program. I have at his suggestion iZotope RX and it is just fabulous. I can manually go into the spectrogram of any file and take out any offending noises. In my instance there were several strange chirps at about 5500hz and with iZotope I was able to get in there and draw a box around the artifact and remove it without removing any of the audible bandwidth. Truly powerful.

[ironbut]

Glad your getting the hang of it. I've found that one of the dangers of this software is you start getting rid of every little bitty bit of noise. Stuff that you'd normally live with gladly. Then you look up and see that 2-3 hours have gone by. Sometimes it's like magic. BTW, have you looked at the video tutorials they have in the support section of their site? 

[panther65]

I will take a look at the videos. I haven't done that yet.
You're right, I spent darn near the entire day on Saturday working on getting the noises out. My wife was ready to kill me.