Improving audio quality after caputring from VHS

[Macphisto]

is there anyway to remove the *HISSING* sound and improve audio quality after capturing froom VHS which has bad audio ?
because it sounds realy bad at hight volumes !

thanx in advance

[Spiffy007]

The same is happening for me. The audio that I've got is quiet enough, but the hissing makes it annoying.

How do I get rid of it?

Thanks.

[Mirror_Image]

There are several nice tools that can do this sort of thing, but do you have anything like that Nero Wave Editor (the one that comes bundled with Nero Burning ROM)? It's no SoundForge or GoldWave, but if you have it it works OK for reducing hiss.

Below is the method I used on a whole MP3 series (several dozen) of Orson Welles radio shows from the 30's (Mercury Theater and Campbell's Playhouse - I love those old shows; Welles was a true master of the spoken word.):

1. Take the audio track (see the "how-to" links on the left side of this site if you need to know how to demultiplex it) and open it in Nero Wave Editor.

2. Highlight a section of the track that has no sounds except the "hiss"; this should be about half a second long, or longer if possible.

3. Enhancement...Noise Analysis.

4. There will be a noise profile on a little graph. Click OK.

5. Select all (the entire audio track).

6. Enhancement...Noise Reduction. Notice that the noise profile that you created with the Noise Analysis of that short "hiss"-only section is shown in the graph that you see.

7. Click the play button to the right of the graph in the Noise Reduction window.

8. If you like what you hear, click OK; if not, click cancel.

9. Multiplex the de-hissed wave file with your video track.

That's it.

It's not ideal, but fairly adequate for basic hiss reduction. If you need something better, buy one of the other two programs mentioned above - they'll have a manual to tell you how to run them.

[gnuZ]

Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge (with the Noise Reduction plug-in) and Syntrillium Software's Cool Edit 2000 and/or Pro (with the Audio Cleanup plug-in) both do a very good job of removing hiss, clicks, pops, etc. in audio tracks. However, these products come with a price: Sound Forge 5.0 and Cool Edit Pro come in at a whopping $400 while Cool Edit 2000 comes in at $69. This does not include the costs for the plug-ins. There are other audio restoration solutions out there (freeware and commercial), but I do not have the time to look for them. Try a search on Google for "audio restoration programs" and see what you come up with. Good luck!

- gnuZ