Recording Analysis and background music removal

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danflet
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Apr 10, 2008 1:13 pm

Recording Analysis and background music removal

Post by danflet »

I have a 20 minute recording of a voice. Some of the voices are too faint to hear and during much of the recording there is background music which makes it very difficult to hear the voice. I have tried to use the GoldWave software to clean up and enhance the recording but frankly I don't know what I am doing. Is there someone out there who can clean up the recording so I can hear the voices? I would be willing to pay a fair amount to someone who can do this. Thanks
DougDbug
Posts: 2172
Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:33 pm
Location: Silicon Valley

Post by DougDbug »

This may be impossible.... :( If you brain can't distinguish the voices from the noise, software probably can't do it either. For example, there is no software that can accurately remove the instruments from a song, leaving just the vocals.*

I don't know much about it, but you might search the net for "forensic audio restoration software" (or services, since you said you are willing to pay). But, don't expect the kind of results you see in the movies...

The best you can do with GoldWave is probably with the Equalizer (or other frequency-filtering). You can experiment (using the "preview" button) in the Equalizer window. You can boost the "voice frequencies" and reduce the noise frequencies. But, the noise-frequencies and voice-frequencies will overlap to a large extent. ,

For starters, you should be able to set the 60Hz and 15kHz sliders to the minimum without any effect on speech. The 150Hz and 400Hz sliders will affect the main vocal range, so try boosting those (one at a time). The 1000Hz, 2400Hz and 6000Hz sliders will affect the "T" and "S" sounds. You'll just just have to experiment with boosting/cutting these frequencies to see it makes things better or worse, because it depends if the noise or "T" & "S" sounds dominate a particular frequency band....

If the Equalizer does make some improvement, you can use the equalizer's settings as a guide and make more accurate or "stronger" adjustments high-pass, low-pass, band-pass, band-stop filters, and/or with the Parametric Equalizer.

GoldWaves Noise Reduction filter is NOT going to help... Noise reduction works by contrasting low-level background noise with a strong signal. It works best when you have a low-level, constant background noise, and a strong signal.... It works best when you nead it the least!




* GoldWave has a Reduce Vocals tool, but it simply uses an "old trick" of subtracting the left and right channels which removes everything in the center. Since the main vocals are usually centered, they are removed.
DewDude420
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Joined: Fri Mar 11, 2005 11:15 pm
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Post by DewDude420 »

It could be done. It would take someone like me hours and hours to just figure out how to isolate the vocal regions to amplify them...and even then, you're ALWAYS going to have BGM leftovers.

doug is right, all the enhancement technology you see in TV and movies is a load of toilet waste..there's no magic button to isolate a vocal or specific sound...about all you can do is maybe enhance/attenuate some frequency bands...but that's about all you can do....

what makes this worse is if your source file is mono...and you don't have any kind of seperation to do any kind of phase callcenation tricks of any kind.
IanA
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:50 pm

Post by IanA »

I would highly recommend trying Elevayta, who produce a program called 'Extra Boy Pro' It is very reasonable priced too at around $30. I've tried it with good results. I've attached the link below ;

http://www.elevayta.com/
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