remove noise from audio

[dreadycarpenter]

so ive been archiving my vhs collection using virtualdub, and dazzle DVC80 as my capture device. works great, but can't find a program that works well for removeing noise from the audio, anyone have any links to free software that is good for this???

thanks
dreadycarpenter

[FredThompson]

Well, there's a number of types of analog noise. You can try using a simple noise gate to set minimum volume level and a bandpass filter ot chop off the low and high ends. If you mean actual hiss in the audio, you'll need something more powerful. AFAIK, there are no good freeware routines to do this. There is a dead project which was a proof-of-concept for cleaning vinyl recordings. Commerical products like Clean!, Dart and Diamond CUT Tools are far more powerful. Some of the mid-range audio editors also have filters which can help. I've used all three of these and far prefer Dart, even though the others have some things it doesn't. It's expensive, though. Maybe the entry-level SoundForge from Sonic Foundry gives some hiss removal now. I don't know much about it.

[avih]

Audacity (http://audacity.sf.net) can removes noise, and has many plugins available.

[FredThompson]

This is true. Audacity is one of the really cool freeware ones. I don't know of a hiss removal, though. Noise gate, yes.

[mkanel]

I tried Audacity for analog tape hiss removal and it works fairly well. I've only used it on WAV files I don't know in what format your Dazzle device captures.

Audacity uses a two step process to remove the noise, first you select a segment of just noise, then you select the segment that needs to be cleaned (probably the whole audio file). When you get to step two of Audacity's noise removal procedure you need to indicate how much noise you want to remove, try very low settings, the default medium setting will probably really distort your audio. After filtering with audacity I had some left over very quiet background noise that sounds a little like a child's keyboard.

I you have Nero 6 suite, the full edition, it's wave editor has a similiar feature that seems to work a little better than audacity's.

I've been using Goldwave but it's shareware. (about $45 I think) I think it works the best of the three with no remaining background noise. Try it with the default setting's except set the FFT size to it's maximum value - 14. Good Luck. Mike.

[dreadycarpenter]

i just capture an uncompressed wav, then re-encode to lame mp3 using bsweet

[mkanel]

dreadycarpenter,

I forgot one very import thing, make sure you get the beta version of audacity, currently 1.2.0-pre3. I think the noise filter is a new feature in that release.

Audacity and Goldwave can both save to mp3 with the lame encoder, I don't kow about nero's wave editor.

If you don't like Audacity's noise removal feature both Nero and Goldwave have trial versions of their programs. Mike.

[dreadycarpenter]

thanks goldwave 5.05 did the trick, the problem acurred due to bad connection but its good to be able to remove hiss\pop

[cweb]

I found nero 6 wave editor to be great for noise reduction, at least it doesn't leave me with an annoying tin sound afterwards....