some audio restoration software

lordsmurf · Posted: Sep 30, 2008 04:35

I've long used GoldWave and SoundForge. But I wanted to see what else was out there.

I have both SoundBooth and Audacity, but really haven't really found them to be of much use when restoring audio.

I used to use DartPro '98, but it would not function in NT environments, abandoned when I moved to Windows XP some years ago. The new version is at http://www.dartpro.com/Main/TryDP24.asp

Here's some of the ones I've started to try out or research:
http://wavearts.com/products/suites/master-restoration/
http://antarestech.com/products/
http://bias-inc.com/products/soundSoapPro/
http://izotope.com/products/audio/rx/
http://diamondcut.com/osc/product_info.php?products_id=63

There was a good article in DV magazine a few months ago, how I got the lead on this.
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2Bdecided · Member Joined: 21 Nov 2007 Location: United Kingdom

It depends what you're trying to do.

For general noise (i.e. hiss) reduction, I like this...
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/noisereduction
...mode 2 is especially useful.

However, the evaluations I've carried out have mainly been for restoration of very old records (i.e. 78s) in something like real time - some supposedly "good" software is quite useless for this.

Cheers,
David.

stantheman1976 · Member Joined: 20 Jul 2002 Location: USA

What type of restoration do you want to do? I found Izotope RX a while back. It's really good at noise removal and declipping.

themaster1 · Member Joined: 16 Nov 2006 Location: France

for tapes, vinyls sounds in bad condition in general you better try wave arts filters which are VST plugins

http://wavearts.com/
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m27315 · Member Joined: 28 Oct 2008 Location: United States

I have used Syntrillium's CoolEdit 95, 96, and CoolEdit Pro, which was bought by Adobe and released under the brand, Audition. FWIW, I have restored over 1000 audio cassette tapes. (I am a noob for video.) My procedure generally is this:

Record on good 24-bit/96-kHz hardware or better (I use EchoAudio with good cables, etc.)
DeClick-DePop
DeNoise (find noise sample, learn profile, remove everywhere - tweak as needed). This is the most time-consuming interactive step.
Optional: Use Dynamic Compressor to reduce dynamic range
Normalize to 100%
Downsample to 16-bit/48-k or 44.1kHz

A long time ago, I played with some of the others, and I have played with some of the newer VST plugins, but I like the old CoolEdit tools, included in Audition, the best.

The batch scripting capability makes the tool invaluable to me.