Jon Noring wrote:I'm a new member of ARSC service and appreciate the broad sources of background and knowledge by the various contributors. I have been working with Cool Edit 2000 and Cool Edit Pro for over three years in "cleaning" both 1/4" master tapes @ 15 IPS (hence, some hiss and a few "pops") and 16" and 17" transcription disks @ 33 1/3 RPM in preparation to burning CD sub-masters for our archive at Family Theater Productions in Hollywood. I had tried various other companies' software and talked via the Web to other archivists prior to settling on the above. I find that it truly does an excellent job at doing a first scan for clicks and pops and ridding the sound track of the majority of such. I then play the file and fix any additional clicks and pops manually. The waveforms (I do most of my work in two track for redundancy even though it's primarily mono) give an excellent visual reference, and "spikes" are easily spotted, magnified and bracketed for quick elimination. For those that are more technical in their requirements, one can tailor the tools to the types of surface noise and frequencies encountered, so there is total flexibility plus one can use the various other "plugins" available via DirectX. I find that the Restoration-NR plugin from Arboretum can "gate" well when backgrounds are realitively steady.
I've previously posted on this topic to the Usenet newsgroup rec.audio.pro, but thought I'd repost it here a few months later, with some editing. I apologize for its length -- consider it as a sort of "white" paper.
It is entirely possible that somebody has built the tool described
here: a manual declicker using frequency-space for visual location
of clicks/glitches, and a robust removal and reconstruction
algorithm to rebuild the wave form at the point the glitch was
removed.
I would agree with Graham that the CEDAR tools are not expensive if you are restoring audio professionally. Consider how much your time costs and then consider how much time is saved by using the right tool.
Having said that, there are probably hundreds of alternative options that are not mentioned in your article. Algorithmix actually wrote the Waves software you mentioned and you can find their technology at a lower price in a number of other products and also under their own name. Every general purpose wave editor and CD burning program seems to have some kind of noise reduction built in.
However, for your purposes I would suggest that you look at Cool Edit Pro. This has the spectral view which makes it easy to find clicks and then a select, button click to bring up dialogue box and button click to remove glitch process for each glitch.
2 or 3 years ago I tried the demo versions of just about all the glitch
removal software that I could find (except the really expensive
hardware/software) and I felt, like you, that most of it was cumbersome
to use. For most basic noise reduction purposes I found that Cool Edit
Pro worked as well as anything for the occasional transfer that I have
to do.
Cheers.
James. - For subscription instructions, see the ARSC home page http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html Copyright of individual posting is owned by the author of the posting and permission to re-transmit or publish a post must be secured from the author of the post.
- For subscription instructions, see the ARSC home page http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html Copyright of individual posting is owned by the author of the posting and permission to re-transmit or publish a post must be secured from the author of the post.