Help with cleaning up old tape recordings

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hi there,

I’ve taken it upon myself to clean up my dad’s old spoken word tapes but am a bit of a novice regarding the parameters required to achieve the best results. I just want to use a couple of effects I can apply to the whole recording without getting too detailed and fiddly.

Attached is a sample of the original recording plus what I’ve been able to do so far; is anyone able to do better/advise? I used ‘noise reduction’ with parameters 25dB, -0.15dB, 400Hz, 0.15secs respectively, then amplified the signal (preferred this to compression as the speech came out too ‘squashed’).

Using Snow Leopard and Audacity 2.0.5.

Thanks!
Dad - Audacity forum edits.aup (1.97 KB)

2

“.aup” files don’t contain any audio. You should attach about 10 seconds in “.wav” format.

3

Hi Trebor,

Sorry I didn’t think about the audio files being on my computer! WAV files attached, thanks. Any thoughts?

4

The tape-player’s clockwork-cogs noise is constant & occupies a lot of the sound-spectrum,
so is impossible to remove completely without damaging the voice.

So I would go with reduction, rather than removal of the cogs noise.

The only tip I have is to apply the code below to remove the hum, (doesn’t remove cogs)

(setf notch-list
  (list '(356 50)  '(715 50) '(1068 50)))
(dolist (nl notch-list *track*)
  (setf *track* (notch2 *track* (first nl)(second nl))))