match EQ of 2 tracks (same 2 songs, different sources/quality).

Hi,
What is the latest and best way Audacity can match EQ of 2 tracks? (and find/keep the setting so it can be applied to other tracks from the same recording).
I have a preFM recording, and an old degenerated tape recording from radio of the same concert, so they’re actually the same songs, but different
quality, the old tape has some ear piercing high end on the hi-hat, like it’s been poorly EQd, also tape hiss and FM noise making it a little hard to EQ by ear.
Is there a good way to match the EQ of a song from the radio tape recording to the preFM, and then apply the same EQ to the whole show?
I’d like to see how close I can get it to sound doing it this way compared to doing it by ear.

There are matching EQ plug-ins (you can Google) but I don’t know if you can find one that’s free or that works with Audacity. (Izotope Ozone has it, but it doesn’t support Audacity and it’s not free.)

I think the combination of bad equalization and media noise is going to be fatal, even if you do it by hand.

There’s another error, too. Tape transfer curves aren’t straight. They have dips and non-linearities, so you would be fighting, in effect, compression damage in addition to all the other problems.

You might be able to make one or the other more pleasant to listen to, but I doubt make them match.

Koz

If you do get close, you may find you’ve reduced the quality of everything to the worst one. Probably not the goal.

Koz

You may be able to get a feel of what you are looking for by doing Analyze > Plot Spectrum.

You could adjust Edit > Filter Curve until the Plot Spectrum looks like what you want, then save your preset.

I hope this helps. :smiley: