Sound Forge / Sound Editting..

[Phil]

Hi,

Anyone any good with Sound Forge?...

I'm transferring some of my old tapes to CD using Sound Forge, I was wondering if there is an easy way to remove hiss (some of the tapes are 'nth generation copies!).

I'd be grateful for any quick tips...

Thanks in advance folks!...


Phil

[butty]

moved 2 help mate

[Mike]

Phil,

As far as soundforge goes I believe there is a plugin you can get for it for noise reduction (not sure of the name but I don't use soundforge much)

I would recommend either:

Steinberg Clean (one of the few pieces of software I actually bought) which has a good 'de-hisser' function for getting rid of tape hiss...

But the one I have had most luck with is Cooledit pro which has a built in noise reduction function. What you do to remove tape hiss is record your tape, including a bit of the hiss from the start of the tape before the music starts. You then highlight the hiss on its own (if you see what I mean) and get the computer to analyse it, then it removes all the equivalent noise the the portion you have selected from the rest of your audio file. Quite clever, and most of the time it works well...

Unfortunately no noise reduction proggy will ever get your old tapes back to CD quality - if the tape is devoid of bass or treble for example the computer will not be able to restore much of these frequencies cos they're not there in the first place!

Hope I have explained this properly, give us a shout if you need more help or if you are unable to locate cooledit

Mike

[JAZ]

Yeah Mike is right, I have encoded 100+ of my tapes and I allways run the cooledit noise reduction on them after I have the wave form.
Only thing I would add is before you use noise reduction goto amplify then choose centre wave as this makes the hiss removal a little bit better, the noise reduction works wonders on tapes that are pretty good quality to start with but on really crappy tapes theres limits to what you can acheive.

Heres a quick walkthrough to show you exactlly what to do (this assumes you use cooledit pro 2.0) --

1st record your tape making sure you record from before you press play on the tape so u get the hiss and tape noise at the start before the music comes in.
After this highlight the whole wave file by double left clicking it, now goto amplitude/amplify and choose the centre wave preset and press ok.
Now highlight just the noise at the start before the music comes in and press the zoom to selection button to zoom in.
Once zoomed in correct it so theres no music highlighted and goto noise reduction/noise reduction and choose get profile from selection after its analyised it press ok.
Now that noise should have dissapered, now we must do the same thing to the whole wave file so highlight the whole wave file by double clicking it (u should zoom out fully 1st so you can see the whole wave form)
Now open the noise reduction again and that profile will still be there so run it on the whole file, this will take a few minutes depending on the tapes length and your pcs power.

[Phil]

Brilliant guys, thanks a lot!...

I'll give you a shout if I'm stuck!...

Thanks again,


Phil