I happened to stumble upon what is apparently the only existing recording of Bill Hicks' last show, as a 663MB MPG file ; there doesn't seem to be any better quality version out there.
It's an especially moving document (considering that he died from cancer a mere few months later), while also still being highly relevant almost 30 years down the proverbial line, so I would like to subtitle it and share it somehow.
The video quality is not great, with a 352x288 resolution, but it's watchable enough for that kind of content. The main problem is with the audio : it was apparently recorded with levels set way too high, making it quite tedious to listen to the whole thing.
What kind of audio processing could improve this somewhat ?
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Last edited by abolibibelot; 16th Sep 2021 at 18:27.
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Thanks for the quick reply. I already played with Audacity's "Clip fix" (threshold 90% after a -10% amplification), it didn't seem to improve much, and even seemed to add distorsion (or make the existing distorsion sound more egregious).
What is Relife VST meant to do precisely ?
Indeed the right channel looks and sounds better. -
Relife is an external plugin; it's another DeCLip module, but with options to tune it - got good reviews back in the day.
If you can't find it I'll upload it myself
I got a better result with the Izotope RX trial, here's a short clipLast edited by davexnet; 16th Sep 2021 at 20:51.
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Surprisingly the first hit for a search with the keywords « "relife vst" audacity » was a 2016 thread from this very forum :
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/380539-Can-this-audio-be-corrected
Is the version downloadable there (1.42) still the most recent non-payware one ?
Years ago I had to fix or rather salvage an audio disaster (in the form of an old woman unwrapping a mint candy for like 10 minutes — actually 1min37s but each second felt excruciatingly long as I was resisting the urge to say very unpleasant things to her or incapacitate her with a swift high-kick to the back of the head{*} — a few seats from my not-so-great equipment as I was recording a lecture that was meant to be shared), for days I tried several advanced audio processing tools, including Izotope RX, and if I remember correctly it produced a decent result (although far from the miracle I was expecting, and even the one I finally chose — don't remember which it was — couldn't get rid of those nasty crackles).
But here, honestly, I don't like the result. The quietest parts sound good, but when the interpolation kicks in it sounds heavily distorded in a weird way, as if it were "bleeding" between channels, with intermittent echo. But it sounds much better played in mono.
In this thread I've read this quote from this other thread :
“I've just figured out that ReLife is an all-pass (i.e. phase-shifing) filter, it does not do any change to the frequency response. It shifts phase at low frequencies.”
...with the conclusion : “So ReLife do[es]n't do anything useful.”
What does the above sentence mean exactly ?
I've also found there that quite funny quip about declipping in general :
“I've heard it referred to as trying to reconstruct a cow from ground beef.”
{*} Which reminds me another bit from Bill Hicks, from an earlier show, where he imagined that very old or terminally ill people could be used for practical special effects in movies... “Do you want your grandmother dying like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet Chuck Norris?” Well, now Chuck Norris might be not too far from this stage himself, so the situation is quite hopeless... As I wrote to someone right after Lemmy Kilmister died, when Chuck Norris finally bites the bullet, the whole male population on Earth will have to be put on testosterone replacement therapy so we still have some hope of postponing our global extinction as a species. -
This Bill Hicks seems like a character, that's for sure I don't think I'd heard of him before.
Probably Izotope RX can do better, I'm hardly an expert at it. Perhaps using the right channel could be a possibility.
The DeClip is supposed to fix the squared off digital samples, and possibly improve the sound of analog overload also
Yes, the version of ReLife I have appears to be 1.42
Here's another sample, using RX's repair assistant. It's less processed, retains more of the distortion,
but sounds more transparent and open. You have to find the right trade-offLast edited by davexnet; 17th Sep 2021 at 02:35.
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