Cleaning up old voice recording

[kmford1307]

Hi-
I have some old recordings (originally made in the 1960s on a small hand-held tape recorder) that I have loaded into itunes from discs. The quality is not great, with background noise and pretty unclear voice. I have tried adjusting the itunes equalizer settings which helps some but not hugely. I just found a link to Audacity and have downloaded it to my mac with OS 10.6.3 Snow Lepoard. I have dragged one of these now MP3 recordings to an audacity project window and have applied the noise reduction tool. Does anybody have any recommendations for anything else I could do to improve the clarity of these recordings? They are of my long gone but dearly loved grandma telling of her early life in Ireland about a hundred years ago and are very precious. I'd love to clean them up for the next generation to enjoy. My tech skills are fairly low, so basic language, please!
Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Kathy

[kozikowski]

I'm not actually advocating this, but since chances of success are almost zero, I can tell you the Hollywood Way would be to sit someone down and transcribe the work into script form and then pay a Voice Talent to read the work into a top quality sound system, a cousin to the way they do Books On Tape. The Voice Talent would listen to the original tapes and not only produce the right words, but the swing, concept, and, if any, the accent of the original. Only you and the readers of this forum would know that it isn't really granny's voice on there, but the listeners of the work will get 95% of the presentation and not have to drudge their way through the damage to hear it.

Back down here on earth, can you choose a representational section of the work, convert it to mono (Tracks > Stereo Track To Mono), export about five seconds of it as a FLAC file, and post it here on the forum for us to chew on? We have effects experts all over earth and we may be able to come up with something.

I'm assuming you have safety copies of the work and are messing with copies -- not originals. Export Everything as WAV files and copy them all to a backup drive or other backup medium.

Koz

[whomper]

do not use mp3, cant really improve them.

start with the original tapes
record in audacity
clean up
export as wav
then and only then convert to mp3 if you must

[kozikowski]

Yes, stay away from MP3 until we resolve this.

Koz