Hello!
I recently installed Audacity 3.7.5 (Windows) in order to clean up a collection of short audio clips, but I don’t know what steps a professional audio engineer would use to do this sort of thing. I’m not looking for perfection, merely something that is an improvement over the original audio.
The audio clips are each around 9 seconds long, originally pressed onto a small, plastic “record” disc in the early 1970s. I have no idea how these audio clips were captured and digitized from the original disc, but the results are pretty bad. Lots of hiss, crackles, pops, and inconsistent volume levels between clips. I think I need to do things like noise reduction, normalization, and maybe some kind of EQing? But I really don’t know, and I certainly don’t know how to use the Audacity tools to do any of this.
So I’m looking for some good tutorials on how to clean up old, poor-quality recordings. I don’t have any way of re-capturing/digitizing these clips off the original disc. I only have the forty .mp3 files that someone else created years ago. I also have zero budget for this so I pretty much have to do this myself using free tools like Audacity.
Thanks!