removing white noise from audio?

[Prince]

Transferring old garage recordings from cassette tapes to CD. I'm using SoundForge to record from the tape, and I am hoping that someone might know a way to decrease the amount of white noise that is so audible. I know there is a way, but I am not familiar enough with all the filters and whatnot. I also you can't turn shit into gold, but at least some improvement in sound quality (=less white noise) is what I am going for.

Hope someone can help.

[oblar]

i think the best way would be to pick out at what frequencies most of your music is at and run it through a passband filter, filtering out most of the high and low frequencies that are outside the range of the desired result..

as far as a program to do it, one doesnt come to mind off hand.. hope the post helped even though i couldnt offer any program suggestions

[digby]

Well, there are programs that do it, but there going to be cost prohibitive. In the msuic industry this is done at the mastering houses. Two of the software platforms that I'm familiar with are SADiE (this one uses the Cedar Audio DeNoise Plugin) and Sonic Solutions (which has their own noise removal options built in). Unfortunately, both of these cost over $10k. And just having the software would be useless as they both run on propriatary DSP chips. All this to say that you're going to have a hard time finding a way to do this well.

However, under the Home Recording Act of 1998, you do have thr legal right to make a backup of all material that you legally own for your own personal usage (ie not selling, loaning out, etc.) I don't see any legal problem with making this backup from someone else's legal copy. So if you can find someone with a remastered version on CD, that might solve your problem.

[junglistic]

Look into some older Easy CD Recorder software. (like 2 years ago).. I havent played with the new ones, but i know the older ones had options to record from tape, and record from turntables. And each had its own white noise reduction/filters built it.

It may be worth checking out.

[Vanquish]

if you have access to Sound Forgue it has a few really nice plugins that allow you to edit some things, I used it a lot and found that much of the noise can be quieted down, not taken out, but at least not as noticable

[jwoody]

I had a similar problem copying some old cassettes to CD and found some useful info on the Dolby website.

http://www.dolby.com/ken/

Basically, I've got a fairly high quality DENON cassette deck, I made a duplicate copy of the cassette with noise reduction on, then replayed the cassette through my amp to computer, again with noise reduction on.

Then I used soundforge to maximise the volume and adjust the treble/bass and voila!

Like you say, you can't turn shit into gold, but it was a significant improvement.

[Prince]

Excellent tips, people. Thank you for helping out, I think I found a solution, thanks to your suggestions.