Recording

rahim

Does any 1 know of any good FREE programs out there to clean up recordings. We're using one mic to record guitar, drums and bass onto a mini-disc and then onto a computer. The quality is pretty good but there's a fair bit of hissing and that.

rahim.

Doctor J

Can't call any free ones to mind, you could just use the EQ on winamp, mediaplayer, etc to take some of the higher frequencies out which contain the hiss.

rahim

Cool, I'll try that. Thanks Doctor J.

musician.ie

Goldwave has a fully functional trial period and a competent noise reduction process.

If you would consider dropping about 15-20 yoyos on a solution, Magix have an excellent, and comprehensive audio cleaning package. I picked it up for this price a year ago in a computer shop.

Of course you know that the reason for the noise is the way you're recording, and you'll never get release quality from it. I still have loads of old cassette recordings done with one mic in the band room. Great memories

The jock

why not try sound forge!

musician.ie

Sound Forge costs several hundred yoyos! Even the screenblast version cost $70.

Forgot to mention, Audacity is free and has noise reduction.

rahim

I'll try some of those, might be willing to spend a couple o' monopoly dollers all right. It's not really for release it's just for the memories and to have something to listen back to.

Eoin Madsen

You can download an unregistered demo of Soundforge 7.0 from http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/download/default.asp. It's a bit buggy (first version since Sony bought Sonic Foundry) but the directX noise reduction plugin that comes with it is pretty good. It should work fully for 30 days, as far as I know. For the noise reduction to work (this applies to most digital noise reduction) you need to use at least two or three seconds of the noise completely on its own to get an accurate noise print.

Cheap noise reduction or noise reduction not used right will cause phase distortions (which sound a bit like chorus). And at the end of the day, there's only so much digital noise reduction you can do before the side effects outway the advantages. You may not be able to remove your noise completely in post production. You could try the EQ route in conjuntion with the noise reduction. Most noise occurs around 8,000 Hz, with most other noise above that - just experiment with the frequency bands and with high shelves. The paragraphic EQ in Soundforge is pretty versatile.

The only other thing I'd suggest is trying to get your recorded signal level on to the MD as high as you can. A lot of the hiss is probably being generated by the AD converters or preamp in the MD. The noise has a fixed level, so the louder the signal is to begin with the less the noise will get boosted later on. For an MD quality recording, I'd say a little bit of accidental clipping would be preferable to playing it safe and getting a shed-load of noise for your trouble.