Noise filter software

[DaveLewis]

My wife recently asked me to try to "save" a couple of old and irreplacable vinyl albums by transferring them to CD. The albums were done by her church choir back in the 1960's(!) and are in rough shape. I've transferred them to .wav format but the sound is full of major noise due to the bad condition of the vinyl. She understands that we'll probably never get a perfect reproduction of the sound but I'd like to clean it up as much as I can.

Could somebody suggest a simple and preferably free software package that I can use to filter out as much of the noise in these files as possible? Once I get the files cleaned up I can convert them to MP3's and then go ahead and burn to CD.

BTW Methodists really can do the old hymns (without starting a religious argument).

[billy00973]

goldwave or sound forge

[Ruler2112]

CoolEdit has (or had) an demo version. It has noise reduction function in it that works quite well.

What I usually do is cut out a snippet of the file that has nothing in it but noise, then loop paste it into a separate file, set the noise level (tell it what is noise), and then run the noise reduction function on the primary file. There's a slew of math that goes along with it, but basically the more you reduce the noise, the more of what you want to keep is reduced. It won't eliminate the noise, but will reduce the amplitude (volume) of it, thereby making it far less noticable. If you select too high of a reduction level, it'll cause your signal to be modified as well, so you'll want to listen to it after reducing the noise but before saving it to make certain no artifacts of your editing can be heard.

If you're putting them on CD as audio, why convert them to MP3? You're losing sound quality in the conversion. Even encoded well with a high bitrate, MP3s lose a lot of information as compared to the straight waves.

[DaveLewis]

Ruler1212 -

I'm going to show off my ignorance (its not hard to do!) in response to your question about converting to MP3s. I'm not an audio person but I am one of those people who thinks that "when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". I know how to burn CDs from MP3 files - mostly usenet stuff - because Nero and Easy CD Creator and everything else have an idiot proof way of doing it. The audio files I want to convert are going to be used with a cd player, not a computer and I assumed that the "capture as a .wav, convert to MP3 and then burn" method was the only way to do it. Maybe I'm missing something here. Has anybody done a "Ripping Audio for Dummies" web site or FAQ? Obviously I'm on the uphill side of the learning curve.

Thanks

[SpookyEddy]

I wouldn't bother with mp3 compression and would burn them as an audio disk, that way you can listen to them on your normal CD player (if you have one). I suppose if you have thousands of recordings that may not be very practical (so storing them as mp3's on a data disk would make more sense)

Regards

ed