ewstoring very old bad audio of a speech

I understand to get rid of hum with Noise Cancellation, but doesn’t that strip the voice of certain midrange and vocal quality ? EQ after the fact ?
Thanks

The “Noise Reduction” effect can substantially reduce constant, low level noise, with minimal adverse affect on the remaining audio, but if the noise level is too high then Noise Reduction becomes less useful and there is a trade-off between the amount of noise removed, and the amount of damage to the remaining audio. The slider controls in Noise Reduction allow you to tweak the effect for the best trade-off (the default settings provide a good compromise in most cases).

Unfortunately, the damage caused by excessive noise reduction is virtually impossible to fix.

Notch filters are sometimes more effective than the Noise Reduction effect for removing constants hum / buzz. Use “Plot Spectrum” and / or the track spectrogram view to find the frequencies present in the hum / buzz.

There was a pre-baked hum remover which you could configure for US or EU power tones.

Looking.

Koz

de-hum.ny (2.11 KB)
There it is.

There’s no magic wand. All corrective tools have artifacts and create some damage. In fuzzy generalities, Audacity can’t split a mixed performance into individual voices, instruments, or sounds. Power Hum is a performer in your show—maybe forever if it’s bad enough.

Hollywood Magic tells us to hire an actor with a similar voice and re-record the work without the damage. If it’s a video, you can use looping techniques.

Koz

thanks I will give the notch filter a try and let you know in a day or so thanks again.
How do I load the de-hum NY file ??

“.ny” files are “Nyquist plug-ins”.
They need to be installed, and then enabled.
Instructions for Windows are here: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/installing_effect_generator_and_analyzer_plug_ins_on_windows.html#nyquist_install

could not get it to show up under effects after enabling it. Try slight noise reduction and some notching of the worst of it thanks again

Nyquist effects appear in the bottom part of the Effect menu (scroll down the menu).