Improve distorted audio

[bohboh]

I took some concert footage on my Canon ixus camera, inevitably the audio is all distorted.

Is there a way of improving it? Any small improvement will do?

I have tried extracting the audio as a wav and tweaking in audacity but i dont really know what it is i need to be doing.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[tinker]

You have to be more specific about distortion type.
But in general if there is a hum or pops they can be fixed, other than that there is not much you can do.
With hum you will loose part of sound because of frequency overlap.
Pops can be cut out, because they are short.
But if it was a live concert, than the noise around is just too much, you will not be able to do much about it.

[bohboh]

But if it was a live concert, than the noise around is just too much, you will not be able to do much about it.

It was exactly that, a live concert. I know that i wont be able to recover the bits that were lost.. its more that i would like to repair what is there to make it at least recognisable if that makes sense. At the moment its a bit harsh.

If its lost then its lost, but if i can do anything, no matter how small then that would be good.

[tinker]

There is a software called Sound Forge, I use it, it will let you do all kind of things to audio file, but it is not free.
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=961
However if the noise is from the crowd around you, it will be waste of money.

[bohboh]

However if the noise is from the crowd around you, it will be waste of money.

I know of soundforge but had completely forgotten about that one, and i didnt know that it was a sony product.

It isnt from the people around, its just simply too much noise for my little compact camera mic to handle so there is a lot of boom boom with it cutting out. (if that makes sense.. )

As a starter, what do i need to play with in soundforge to make it sound better?

[tinker]

Yes for that Sound Forge will do the trick if it is not too much, because you have to cut it out of the file.

[nic2k4]

Sounds like your mic was getting overloaded and clipping. I've used a program from Magix called Audio Cleaning 11, to re-shape sound curves. It does a decent job when the corrections are short; large corrections might sound a little wierd. You open your audio track in the editor and use the pencil tool. Just drag it straight across the part of the curb you want to fix and it will smooth it out. This thing can take a square wave and turn it into a sine wave. I've seen it at BestBuy for under $35.

[Soopafresh]

post a couple of seconds of the sound

[bohboh]

Here is a sample, gold star to anyone who can guess the band

There is a demo version which i will have a play with, i will no doubt have questions.

test.wav

[stantheman1976]

That's from your mic being extremely overloaded. I don't think there is any way on earth to fix that. Those on camera mics were not meant to handle sounds that loud.

[dfisher052]

I've fixed a lot of pretty bad sound over the years, but that's the worst i've ever heard. I really don't think you'll be able to do that with the programs that may be available. I'm not even sure that a professional lab could do much with that. There just isn't enough original music to work with.

[bohboh]

Thought as much, well i just wanted to try and keep some for my personal collection.. oh well. Thanks everyone.

[Soopafresh]

Here's the audio of the Huygens spacecraft landing on the surface of Titan. Compare

titan_lander_descent.mp3