I’ve been reading and listening and researching “How to use audacity to remove echo from a recording”. And, I’ve heard about different plug-ins; Noise Reduction, Reverb,Echo, Noise Gate, etc… And I’ve been down a couple of rabbit holes. But my echo isn’t an echo produced because of the space or location used for the recording. And if I can accomplish removing this echo I’ll probably never have need to do this again.
My echo is a perfect duplicate of the recording, just at a lower volume. It’s really more of a ghost. Like the kind of ghost you used to see on a television when the reception was really bad and you had to adjust the rabbit ears. LOL (I might be telling my age there).
The tapes I’m working on were produced in the 1970’s on a little desktop or handheld cassette recorder. The original quality is obvious and the age hasn’t done it any favors either, so I understand what I’m dealing with. But these are my grandmother talking about her life as a child and young bride.
Understandably there is more than way to cook a turkey as there are many ways to address the same thing in audacity.
So what kind of echo is my echo? and what are some recommendations on how to “cook this bird”?
Tapes can have print-through where some of the work shows up on the next tape layer down. You only get one “echo,” so it’s not like room reverberation-ation-ation-ation.
Post some on the forum. The upload icon is the bar with up arrow in the icons above your text screen. Ten seconds is a good sample. I believe your limit in 4MB.
The latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) can separate similar voices talking at the same time, so may be able to cure print-through
The only possible improvement via Audacity is a noise-gate to squelch the faint print-through voice when the louder voice has stopped speaking, e.g. the gap between sentences. Audacity cannot separate voices talking at the same time, (on a mono recording).