Heartland

Was looking thru a load of old cassettes (remember them?!) the other day, and would like to copy some to PC. Just wondering if anyone has done this before and has any tips on cleaning up the hiss etc. I've acquired a tape deck with lineout and my soundcard has a linein, so I'm halfway there, but any pointers on software/plugins would be much appreciated.

dan's yer man i reckon.

Yup, Goldwave is best by far. Especially if you know how to work around the limitations

Moving swiftly on...

Anyway, unless they're way too hissy, you're better off leaving it be. You can never really reduce it satisfactorily without affecting the sound quality, but GW does come with some good noise reduction filters. Grab version 4 if you can, it's more than good enough.

And one final tip with these things - do remember to correct the offsets independently for each channel, you'll thank yourself for it later.

Audio Cleaning Lab.
http://www.magix.com

I use soundforge to clean up audio I've recorded from tape. It has a bunch of different equaliser settings built in (plus mine has a couple of custom settings I made for getting rid of tape hiss).

When you record the audio to your pc, make sure it's not too loud, otherwise the tops of the peaks get flattened, causing that crackly sound you hear on some boots.

Once the audio is on your pc you'll find one channel is louder than the other (with tape it almost always is), but this can be sorted out with the normalise function. Often one channel is much better quality than the other. If it's a boot it's almost certainly from a single microphone, so it isn't really stereo anyway, so just use the best channel and copy it to a new window.

When you process the audio with the equaliser, after it's been processed it can end up louder, so if the audio you started off with was peaking quite high, you'll get the tops of your peaks flattened, so if this happened, use the undo feature to go back, then reduce the volume of the audio and try again.

For the really aggressive hiss, it has an equaliser setting called "fletcher munson curve" that's quite effective.

You'll find that sometimes when you dehiss audio you might lose some high frequency sounds, but it's a kind of tradeoff, so you decide which sounds better, sh!tloads of hiss or losing some high frequency sounds. Or you can just have half and half and just get rid of some of the hiss and leave the high frequency sounds. I made another equaliser setting for that.

I also sometimes use Groove Mechanic. It sometimes dehisses better than soundforge. It also declicks scratchy vinyl. I had a tape that had been made from an album, and one side of the album was scratched to f*ck, but the other was fine. After declicking them you can't tell the difference between the 2 sides!

If the tape is the master I find it doesn't need any processing at all, except maybe making sure both channels are the same volume level.

Declicking is tricky with the Sisters because of the Doktor. It quickly becomes a reverb fest. I tend to use a wide stereo effect to push it to the background and then step on the loud pedal. The latter drowns out the hiss. Problem often is Eldritch's unique vocal delivery. It either is too low in the mix or peaks (ie end of Anaconda) heavily.

Is there any program with pitch control ?

Hojyuu-obi wrote:Is there any program with pitch control ?

Depends on what you want to do. Slow down the soundreel or adjust the levels?

Karst wrote:

Hojyuu-obi wrote:Is there any program with pitch control ?

Depends on what you want to do. Slow down the soundreel or adjust the levels?

Actually speed up the sound (think: Long Beach '85, Amsterdam Paradiso '83, Blackburn Kings Hall '85 who all sound very s-l-o-w-ish)

Soundforge lets you do speed correction. I used it for Camden Palace 12.8.83 which was *very* slow at 35 minutes when it should have been 30 minutes.

EDIT: Just choose a song and time various versions of that song from the same tour to get an average length, and apply that to your slow recording and you won't go far wrong.

Speeding up of the sound is a dangerous venture. But can be done with for instance Audio Cleaning Lab.

Soundforge's time expander/compressor works perfect (mess around with the setting and compare them), but if you use Cubase or Nuendo there are better VST plugins for the job...

For tape to MP3, I use Nuendo (actually, I use Nuendo for ALL sound-related stuff, It's ace! But meybe too expanded fer yer average MP3-editing ) and the Restoration Plugin (declick/denoise). Works perfect. There's even a special lowband noise filter especially for audio tapes.



IZ.

EDIT: Just choose a song and time various versions of that song from the same tour to get an average length, and apply that to your slow recording and you won't go far wrong.

Oh good , im not the only person who used this advanced scientific method...............

Or listen to the speed of the Wake vid as it is the only official live recording that exists from around that time.

Nuendo as in the Steinberg product? Ah, now where is that Lottery ticket.

Goldwave will do it too, and has a fairly comprehensive feature set for all kinds of speed correction stuff.

Karst wrote:Nuendo as in the Steinberg product? Ah, now where is that Lottery ticket.

The Steinberg one, yes. Quite expensive I know, but...

There are.... other ways.





IZ.