Filtering Old Recordings

[Boobounder]

I've been using Audacity for a while - mostly for digitizing old cassettes.

I need a pointer to useful articles for someone who is no longer a beginner, but has no intention of producing anything professional. I have some problems I'm having trouble fixing:

1) Older live music that needs either low pass or high pass filtering.
2) A tape that I adjusted with an equalizer without a spectrum analyzer - how can I "see" what I did to undo it?
3) Tapes that have electronic noise - I'm thinking there was a ground fault in the deck at the time of recording.
4) Tapes from LPs in which there is turntable rumble.

[waxcylinder]

I have been an avid user of Audacity for over two years now - mainly to digitize and "clean/repair" my vinyl (45 & 33), cassette tape and MD collection. I use Audacity for the recording and some editing - and also for breaking the records into labelled tracks for exporting as WAV files.

Last Christmas I was given a steer (thanks again Koz) to a website run by an Australian mathematician, Brian Davies. When he was faced with the same repair/cleanup problem he soon tired of doing it manually and used his mathematical and programming expertise to produce a couple of software packages of tools to do the job. See his site at: http://www.maths.anu.edu.au/~briand/sou ... _download/

These packages are not free, but are relatively cheap - and I think certainly worth the money. Brian lets you have a 21-day free trial to test if the software is satisfactory for you.

I triallled the ClickRepair last year and purchased it and have used it extensively for the past year - IMHO it is only a little short of "magic" in the clean-uo jobs it does on old scratched records. See my thread on it here: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1994

I trialled the DeNoise on a couple of LPs I had of old blues recordings that had obviously been taken from old 78s. This package was a little harder to set up compared with - but it still produced good results. The only reason I didn't buy this was that I have no other recordings on LP or tape that would need this processing.

WC

BTW re your earlier posting in May - did you give up on the idea of restoring your old record deck and using the vinyls for this digitization project - just curious?

[steve]

If you are a Linux user, then "Gnome Wave Cleaner" has some excellent tools for cleaning and restoring old recordings.