I’ve read several tutorials about cleaning up voice recordings. Most say EQ first then compress; one lists compression before EQ. I have wav files from the 1960s of my grandfather interviewing my great-grandmother. He used a reel-to-reel he had just purchased that had not been adjusted. There’s sporadic squeal caused by tape transport. Have tried the notch filter and customizable EQ for the squeal but still fighting it. Running out of patience and ready to listen to my elders. I’ve attached a sample plus a screen capture of the sample, so you can hear/see the wave form.
Notch filter and/or Equalization effects are the right tools, but I doubt that you will be able to eliminate the squeal because it is made up of multiple frequencies and the frequencies are not constant. The best that you are likely to be able to do is to reduce the squeal.
I doubt that compression will help at all.
I probably confused my own question by mentioning compression. I’ve also been working with that on a separate issue of wide variation in volume.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion that each instance of the squeal will have to be handled separately, if it’s on top of words I want to keep. Fortunately most of the recording does not have this problem.
By the way, I’ve also taken this into Reaper, where some of the plugins will let me “grab” a parameter like notch frequency and move it around while the sound is playing. I can see and hear results in real time. Anything like that available for Audacity?
