improving/recovering voice records

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hi guys!

I’m not exactly new to audacity, I used it for some fun work before, editing songs and cutting them down to jingles and stuff like that - but I’m not quite a professional yet, as you can guess from my experiences.

I have a record of a non-professionally produced theater play which I converted from an old VHS-Cassette to DVD.
Sadly, it’s almost impossible to understand due to the bad quality of the microphone it was recorded with and the damage the cassette has taken in the years that passed on since it was recorded.

I already tried around with the noise elimination feature, but it didn’t really make something better since the voice is - compared to the noise - very quiet.

Any suggestions?

greets,
Carsten

I want to apologize for mistakes by the way, english is not my mother tongue.

2

It’s most likely impossible to ever get things sounding nice. This sentence details the reason why:

the voice is - compared to the noise - very quiet.

When you’ve got a voice buried underneath a mountain of noise, the only hope you’ll have is removing the noise. If you can’t remove the noise then you’re probably out of luck.

You said that the Noise Removal didn’t work out, but I will say that the Noise Removal in Audacity 1.3.4 is much much better than in the Stable 1.2.6 version. So you can try using that, but it still might be asking too much.