Audacity vs Audition and Amadeus

I’ve been using Audacity 3.2.4 for the sake of its general noise filter and for little else, but if I could be sure that it can do the other things I need to do, I would willingly use it exclusively. Older versions of Amadeus, for instance, allow me to edit or erase entirely one track of a stereo file. Can Audacity do this? And the “spectral display” of Audition permits editing of individual aspects of the sound by showing where a squeak or a tick lies in the total sound environment so that it can be removed without altering the rest of the sounds at that instant of the recording. I find nothing comparable in Audacity. Am I wrong?

Your description does not make it clear, but I’m guessing that you want to end up with a mono track that was previously the right or left channel of a stereo track. In Audacity you do that by splitting the stereo track (Audio Track Dropdown Menu - Audacity Manual), then delete the track that you don’t want.


Audacity has basic “spectral editing”, but it’s not as sophisticated as Audition’s spectral editing. Spectral Selection and Editing - Audacity Manual

Audacity also has some features that neither Audition or Amadeus have. For example , it has the immensely powerful “Nyquist” audio programming language built in (a rather “advanced” feature for “power users”). Nyquist - Audacity Manual

And let’s not forget the price difference :wink:

You will find that the Audacity manual has a wealth of information about Audacity’s capabilities:

https://manual.audacityteam.org/

Reply to WaxCylinder: Given your moniker, I’m sure you are familiar with the kind of extended noise filtering I need to do with 78s, but the ticks and pops are what I would need help with, and the Audacity manual’s spectral display examples don’t seem to deal with these. If the cursor could be altered so as to box in or smear away these occasional vertical images, as in Audition, I could manage fairly well.

Reply to Steve: Thanks for helping me find the instructions for revealing the spectral display, but the section on “Spectral Deletion” appears to deal exclusively with noises like squeals and whistles, which extend over a period of time, whereas I need to remove unwanted mouth noises from spoken recordings (noises caused generally by the mucus membranes).

(By the way, your guess about my interest in treating left and right tracks separately was spot on, since stereo recordings of, let’s say, a guitar piece, are unnecessary, so if one track of a stereo tape is significantly louder than the other, it makes sense to jettison the weaker track with its higher proportion of tape hiss vs desired sound. Thanks.)

Indeed - and I edited (and wrote a large part of) this tutorial in the menu:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recording_78_rpm_records.html
This tutorial does give some tips on noise filtering for recordings of 78s

When I digitized my LPs and 45s I used an excellent app called ClickRepair to repair my clicks and pops - it gave excellent results.
See this sticky Forum thread:

Sadly this app is no longer commercially available, but it can be found in various places on the Internet I believe (but take care in so doing).
A similar package that reportedly also produces very good results is GoldWave

The author of that ClickRepair also had another specific package for editing recordings of 78s called DeNoise. I did use that (free trial for a fortnight) to improve the recordings I had on vinyl of old delta blues recordings. These had all clearly been on 78 shellac and later transferred to vinyl (but long before modern digital processing of sound recordings). I found that I had to use different settings for every single track on the multi-LP boxed-set.

Peter.

In which case you may find the DeEsser plugin written by Paul Licameli a few years ago useful. See:

Peter.

What serious archivists of mono recordings of old LPs and 78s often do is to make the two channel chnnel recording and them use whichever parts of each track is the better at any period of time in the recording, muting the lesser part. This is hard work and requires a lot of patience and requires careful listening.

Peter.

If you reduce the “window size” parameter in the spectrogram from the default setting,
clicks become more visible …
decreasing spectrogram 'window size' makes click (@2sec) visible.gif