Audio Restoration - HELP HELP HELP!

[Appleluza]

I have a digitized dub (WAV file) of 35-year-old reel-to-reel 1/4-inch recording of my Grandfather telling his life story.  I made the tape when I was younger and dumber than I am now, and while the recording is priceless, it is flawed by the fact that my Grandfather continually fingered the microphone while he was speaking.  All the rubbing and handling of the mic, of course, was recorded onto the tape along with his voice and makes the recording very annoying to listen to.  It is a constant series of loud noise in the low end, some during pauses in the speaking, but a lot of the noise is recorded on top of the voice. The noise is a complex, non-repeating sound form, not just one single noise like a pop or a click.

I posted a short 5-second sample of the WAV file (the whole tape is 2 hours long) here: http://www.openmusicstudio.com/Stewart_Sample.wav

I would appreciate any suggestions anyone has for how to clean/improve the quality of this voice-over recording.  I am interested in seeing if I could use some of my exsting EQ or Gate tools to scrub this, if I should just do the best I could going phrase by phrase to cut out as much of the bad stuff as possible, of if I should buy some super audio tool to remove the unwanted noise.  I tried some click removal software from SoundForge a few years ago, but it didn't really work.

Thanks,

Rob T

[Tacman7]

I had a run at it in Sound Forge.

The noise frequencies seem to be in the same range as a lot of the voice.

Multi-band dynamics, gating, and Eq couldn't really offer any improvement.

I can't find any frequencies to hear voice without noise.

Doesn't look good to me.

Removing noise that doesn't happen during speaking would be a minor improvement but really tedious and a big job.

[NickT]

waves has some good restoration tools that might help.

It won't be perfect but should be an improvement.

Nick

[CosmicDolphin]

There is an answer but you ain't gonna like it.....


There's a company called Cedar who are the leaders in audio restoration and forensic audio.  They have a product called re-touch which is descibed as photoshop for audio.  Sadly I think it only runs on Sadie.

As a lower cost option you could try Bias Soundsoap2

CosmicDolphin

[Appleluza]

Thanks for the comments, Tom, Nick and Mark.  Based on Mark's advice, I might try to see if I can find a studio which has experience with Re-Touch and see if they would take on a restoration project for hire.  Mark, do you know of any such studios?  I looked around on the internet and came up with one possibility, a stuido in London called the Classical Recording Studio.

Rob

[Cary]

I downloaded your example and it would be a lot of work to restore.  I guess the question is:  how do you specify exactly what you want done?  No engineer is going to be able to remove that noise without removing alot of the actual voice data so it becomes an improvement issue.  For example, I was able to remove lots of the annoying mic shuffling, but the voice sounded extremely thin.  When it comes to forensic audio restoration, the goal is to get the words discernable.  That might not be so nice to listen to either.  When it comes to finding an engineer to do the work, I would suspect every studio which does this sort of thing would have their own special tools that they like to use.  Don't paint them into a corner by specifying which software they should use.

I'm sorry to sound negative - my hope is for this to work out well for you.  Best of luck on this endeavor.

[Sternen]

I can't really help you with the audio part of it...  but I did want to say this....

You are one lucky bastard!!!  I mean that!

I thought about doing something like this with my grandfather, but never did.  It is too late now and I regret the hell out of it.  As annoying as it may be, it is still a treasure to have something like this. 

[CosmicDolphin]

Thanks for the comments, Tom, Nick and Mark.  Based on Mark's advice, I might try to see if I can find a studio which has experience with Re-Touch and see if they would take on a restoration project for hire.  Mark, do you know of any such studios?  I looked around on the internet and came up with one possibility, a stuido in London called the Classical Recording Studio.

Rob

There's a guy who writes as the Technical Editor for Sound on Sound magazine called Hugh Robjohns and in an article earlier this year ( February I think ) called Desert Island Plugins and he said he always uses it and is amazed how well it works.  Apparently the software will interpolate audio from the wanted signal in place of the unwanted sound taken out to make it seamless.  They use an example of taking a police siren out of the background of violin recording, so it goes way beyond normal eq etc....kinda works in a 3D time/ frequency / amplitude view so you can see the audio and unwanted noise on a graph and remove it without touching the source material.

I've often seen him answer posts on their website forum , so it could be worth starting a thread on there, maybe you can hire him ?

It may also be worth taking out their e-sub so you can read the original article, there's tons of other good stuff on it too.

CosmicD

[Appleluza]

Thanks, I'll check it out.  I've gotten the mag for a couple of years and have all the issues I've ever gotten.

[CosmicDolphin]

I checked  - It was definitely Feb 2007