I have this song recorded from vinyl (with click and crackle removed), I tried filtering Audacity’s noise reduction on it in their best settings (9-6-3) but it’s damaging the sound, I tried tape.it and Dolby’s phone app too and it’s also damaging the sound. How can I reduce the noise from the sample without damaging the sound?
Thanks!
Link: 16.48 MB file on MEGA
Key: 5EKXQOp7-AArQuXzfAGhWXlnMKB7c7XU5cIrwTYh6j8
There’s also little distortion in it so please help me clean it too
I always used 6-6-6 for removing FM-hiss with great results.
In fact we changed the default setting in Audacity’s NR to be just that some while ago.
Peter
It can be a trade-off… You’re rarely going to get “digital quality” from an analog record. 
Sometimes it’s better to leave some noise, or to do nothing.
Sometimes you might just want to apply noise reduction during fade-in and fade-out and leave most of the music untouched. Of course you can mute completely between tracks. But if you are listening to the album, it’s sometimes more distracting to hear the background noise cut in-and-out than to hear it constantly.
Noise Reduction works best when you have a tiny-constant background noise… When you don’t really need it. If the noise is bad, “the cure can be worse than the disease.”
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As others have noted, you won’t get CD sound out of vinyl to digital conversion using simplistic tools. I’d also note that the act of recording an analog sound in digital is “damaging the sound” as I’m sure you understand.
That said, I’ve converted more than 2,000 vinyl records to digital. Mostly for my own use, but frequently to get them in as good shape as possible to convince record companies, agents, and some times artists to spend the money getting the sound remastered by an actual sound engineer using a professional studio speaker and DAW setup.
How you process vinyl, the stylus used, the A2D conversion, the Audacity project rate, cable lengths and quality, even powerline filtering can all add and subtract from the finished product.
I downloaded your sample, and put it through my standard Audacity process. The output MP3 can be downloaded here: Unique Download Link | WeTransfer
This would be my start point. After this I’d listen to it on headphones and decide if I need to reprocess, if I need to use different software setup, declick, etc. Each vinyl record is a direct result of of it was originally cut and mastered, it’s pressing, it’s handling and wear and the process you need to go through will depend on all these.
45RPM records are very different than 33 1/3RPM. Sometimes I can spend a whole morning manually declicking a vinyl album, if it’s worth it, it’s worth it.
Have a listen to this, don’t come back and ask for WAV, or FLAC - without knowing your exact setup and how you recorded the album, all the settings etc. The file format, sampling, project rate etc. If nothing else, this can serve as a bad example
++Mark.
But with care, a good hi-fi setup for the capture and good use of Audacity one can produce some excellent results especially if you are outputting WAV (uncompressed) files.
And sometimes a re-issued, re-mastered, CD can be worse than digitized vinyl. My prime example of this is Emmylou Harris’ album “Luxury Liner”. Rather than digitize the vinyl I initially bought the re-issue CD. They had remastered this so badly (probably in the name of the “loudness war”) that Emmylou’s voice is pushed far behind the (now louder) instruments in the stereo sound stage. This led me to discard that and instead digitize my old, much-played, vinyl LP of that album.
Like you Mark, I also digitized thousands of LPs and hundreds of 45s - and the resultant audio I listen to on my QUAD ELS-57 electrostatic (very detailed) loudspeakers and I’m always pleased with the results (after the audio cleanup, better than replaying the LPs).
While I agree with most of what you say Mark, I’m afraid that my belief is that this is not the case if you are producing WAV files.
It definitely is the case if you are producing MP3s or AACs for listening on a portable recorder as those formats deliberately discard some of the audio data. But having said that MP3s and AACs, at higher bitrates, can produce some really good results (I also listen to my digitized audio in those formats on my iPod with high-end Sennheiser and Bowers&Wilkins headphones).
And don’t forgot that almost all modern vinyl that is produced (and a lot of older stuff too) has digital audio as part of the production process before the analog vinyl is pressed.
I started out manually repairing the clicks and pops on my LP recordings, but fortunately early on I got a steer from my fellow Forum-elf Kozikowski to an amazing piece of software created by an Australian mathematician called Click Repair.
I spent the best part of a week manually declicking a favourite album of my wife’s by Kate & Anna McGarrigle “Pronto Monto” (at the time Warner Brothers were sitting on the rights to this and not putting out a CD). Just as I was finishing this I got the steer from Koz and used ClickRepair on my raw recording. It worked its magic in barely a couple of minutes and produced a superior result to my hand-crafted effort.
Sadly ClickRepair is no longer commercially available - but I think that you can use Goldwave for similar results (other apps may be available).
Peter
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The critical part of cleaning up recorded vinyl is physically cleaning the vinyl before recording. Clicks, pops, and surface noise can be greatly reduced using modern cleaning methods (surfactants, ultrasonics, vacuum.) The less you have to do after the fact, the greater the chances of getting great sound.
Try iZotope RX or Adobe Audition’s spectral editing for precise noise reduction without harming the audio quality. Use multi-band EQ to clean up distortion. If you’re in Canterbury, consider visiting a local studio for professional restoration!
Adobe Audition is paid… I’m looking for a freeware
But izotope RX is paid
Many very good points.
My purpose was to just illustrate that just because a user has a recording of a vinyl album that has some noise, there is so much to do that is outside of the recording - it isn’t just a case of help me reduce the noise on this recording without damaging it.
For those of you using Windows, you might want to take a look at Wave Corrector. Apparently it was a paid-for program that is now free and has enhancements. The GUI is quite ‘quirky’ but it does do various kinds of noise removal.
Mark B
Thanks great catch. Looks pretty interesting. I’ll give it a try next week.
Thanks again from one Mark to another
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