Cleaning up old demos with Audacity 2.0.5

I’ve got some old Van Halen demos from 1973-1976, and I’ve been trying to remove their metallic, tinny sound and plastic drum sound. I am also trying to make the vocals louder. To be precise, I am working with this, which I downloaded as an MP3 stereo file. I have been using noise removal, normalisation, the compressor and boosting the bass, and so far, so good. But I need help on removing the metallic old sound and improving the quality.

removing the metallic old sound and improving the quality.

The metallic sound is a combination of permanent compression distortion and what is probably fake stereo processing permanent distortion.

We’re very clear that we can’t take processing out of a performance. That’s why we require voice performers to give us raw capture clips, not post production fails.

Is it possible to get work closer to the original?

Koz

Make an in-sync duplicate of the original track, [Ctrl+D], then apply isolate vocals to the duplicate track, then mix that back with the original to boost the vocal volume.

You got a lot of work on your hands cleaning up the percussion …

[ You’ll need Audacity’s spectral edit tool for that ].