I use Windows 7 Home Premium and have Audacity 2.0.6.
I have captured a jr. high band concert in a school gym from a cassette recording in the 1980s. I have edited it in Audacity and it’s turning out pretty well. But before burning CDs for my adult kids, I’m wondering if any of the Effects would enhance that type of sound, make it richer or somehow better. At the time I just held the cassette recorder while the band played this great song. Not plugged into a sound board or anything. Any thoughts?
Considering the rudimentary recording method, it sounds like you had a lucky result. Hand-held recorders of bands in a school gym usually turn out terrible, but if you have a recording that is half decent, then congratulations.
It’s unlikely that attempts to “enhance” the recording will pay off - more likely that the effort will reduce the quality, though one effect that may provide a useful improvement is the Equalization effect. Basically, the Equalization effect is a fancy “tone control”. When equalizing a recording, it is important that you are working with a reasonable playback system, otherwise you will be compensating for the inadequacies of the speakers/headphones that you are listening with, which will probably make the recording sound worse when listened to on other equipment.
The manual page for the Equalization effect is here: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/equalization.html
Just try selecting a short part of the recording, and try previewing with different settings. If you find some settings that sound good, try applying those settings to a larger portion of the recording.
IMPORTANT - ensure that you have a back-up copy before you start experimenting with effects. If the recording ends up sounding worse than the original, you’ll be very glad of the back-up
