I am working on a project that requires noise reduction. On an audio bible that was recorded in the 50’s.
Aside from the hard clipping, I am able to excellent results and depending on the recording, near studio like quality.
This is done by remove 3-5 db taking new samples on wach pass.
I typically go through the a chapter at a time, selecting and copying pauses between speech into a new track.
I concactenate all the pauses into one long noise signature.
I then copy that, and on the copy compress it with a bery low noise floor and high compression. Sometimes more than once on a given time.
I take a sample of that and then remove noise from the audio recording with extremely low .0001 sensitivity, 0 frequency smoothing, and as I said 3-5 db at a time.
I ctrl R this on my noise signature sample, copy it again, and repeat.
I do this until I get no artifacts. Sometimes increasing frequency smoothing on the last couple of passes.
And to finish, I compress the main audio with -1 db threshold and -20db noise floor.
And if needed I apply a lax noise gate for good measure.
I get excellent results. Better than what I can produce with CC Audition.
These steps could be easily scripted and applied to the whole audio bible.
It would require some math to detect pauses between speech and some logistics to concactenate them all. But aside from that, the rest is easy.
I am not a programmer, so if this could be done I would be happy to give you the exact steps. That way a simple “background noise” plugin could be made to replicate all this hard work at the push of a button.
This would be very useful, because in 2017 some one attempted to restore the recordings, but all they did was some minor/sloppy noise removal and boosted the bass/eq. And it took him a yr, and it sounds like shit.
I did this for a few chapters, and it sounds very good, better than all the other versions in existence.
Lmk if someone is willing to take on a challenge like this.