Boosting music audio on old live vinyl Kinks album

[dkw121652]

I am going to digitize a very old but in good shape Kinks live in Stockholm vinyl LP. It has some great live versions of many Kinks songs, but the crowd noise overshadows the album to an extent as it was well recorded technically, but probably somewhat inferior by today’s standards. Is there an easy way to generally boost the music portions of the audio without compromising the overall fidelity of a really great, early live Kinks album?

[DVDdoug]

If you just want to fade-down the crowd noise between songs or fade-down the volume during certain parts, yes there a couple of ways of doing that. But you can’t reduce the noise on top of the music.

There is an Envelope Tool for fading-up or fading-down a selection of audio. The trick is to leave the fade from the endpoints of the envelope without any sudden jumps up or down. (It can be a bit awkward.)

But if you want to make lots of adjustments, I’d do it differently…

I’d split it into individual songs, and the applause/talking between songs, etc. There are a couple of ways of doing that - I select a section and Export Selected Audio, each as a separate file. (I actually select a little extra at the beginning & end.)

Now you can adjust the volume of each section separately (with the Amplify effect) and/or trim-out any excessive taking or excessive gaps between songs, etc.

Then you can re-import the tracks (“import”, don’t “open”) and re-join the tracks with Crossfades for a smooth undetectable edit. You can also join/blend the sides of an LP.

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If you are making a CD, you can use one big WAV file and make a Cue Sheet to set the track markers. (I use ImgBurn to burn from a Cue Sheet.)

If you are making a concert-length WAV or MP3 file there is no standardized way of identifying/labeling the songs.

I usually make a full-concert file, plus separate song files. For the song files I like to make a short 1 or 2 second fade-in of the applause and a 10-15 second fade-out (depending on what I have to work with). And, sometimes I’ll steal applause from different parts of the recording to extend the fade-out and make it more “natural”.

[dkw121652]

Thanks, DVDdoug. Also thanks for recommending the export selected audio. I usually make one big MP3 file using the best sampling rate , and then also cut the thing down to individual MP3 files but also keep the original originally recorded big file.