Anything I can do to clear a recording up?

Shiminay

Hey there all, I don't pop in here all that often, but I have a favour to ask. My housemate has some songs he's been working on and he has recorded them onto a small wee tape recorder from when himself and the 2 other's he's working with were jamming out in his shed. It's heavy metal stuff, so it's loud I've tried to take from the tape onto my lappy (via the mic plug on the device) and I get nothing but a big square wave. I'm using Soundforge 8 for the recording and tbh, I'm not massively familiar with it, but I've been trying unsuccessfully to clear the recording up somehow. The source material is not good, but the digital recording was slightly worse

Are there any obvious steps/tips that you the learned ones may be able to impart?

Thanks in advance.

squibs

Magix audio cleaning lab may help somewhat here, but ultimately it's an excercise in turd polishing. By taking it from tape to digital, you are again losing some quality in the conversion. Soundforge should have some noise reduction tools. Why would you spend a bomb on that app and not read the manual? Seems like a waste...

The magix package is cheap but very effective. It take a while to set up the noise reduction, de-hisser, etc but do spend time on this step - this is where you get yor results. You need to balance the restoration between removing sufficient noise and not degrading the real signal too much. Basically find the loudest song on the tape and set the levels so they are just short of clipping at the loudest point of that.

Do not use the mic connection - on a consumer laptop card it's optimised for voice comms and will sound awful. Use the line in if available. If not buy an audio interface.

cornbb

The big square wave was probably caused by clipping, so turn down the volume of the tape player before recording onto the laptop for a start. And ideally try to buy/borrow an audio interface. Don't expect magical results though.

frobisher

There is a possiblity that your signal on the tape is clipping. Some of those old tape recorders had surprisingly effective limiters and compressors in them. Some of them didn't. If you can control the output of the cassette and the input on the computer make sure that they are both low enough so that you're not introducing any clipping during the transfer. If you do this and the wave form is still a block then I'm afriad that all the dynamics have gone because the actual signal on the tape is like that too. If that's not the case and you're still having problems come back and we'll take it from there.

red_ice

not that anyone seemed to care - i did this little tutorial up a while ago

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055049070

gl - i rekon it works a treat

cornbb

I missed that one - looks like it would definitely be worth adding to the sticky at the top of the forum?

frobisher

red_ice wrote:

not that anyone seemed to care - i did this little tutorial up a while ago

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055049070

gl - i rekon it works a treat

Damn, it seems I missed this one for the sticky. Bad Frob'. Could you cut and paste and repost it under the sticky (that way it will be under your name rather than me doing it under mine)? Credit given where it's due!