Help cleaning white noise from an audio file

nerudaneruda
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
My favorite version of Rachmaninoff's No.3 is performed by Rafael Orozco. The problem is that every version of Orozco's performance contains excessive white noise. To experience this yourself, search for "Rafael Orozco" in the iTunes music store and play the preview for Piano Concerto No. 3 (17:29 track length).



First, I have listened to many versions of the Rach 3, and I think Orozco's version is the absolute best interpretation IMO. I have tried using Amadeus to get rid of this white noise, but the resulting file sounds horrible.



Can anyone recommend an audio cleaner program that doesn't degrade the quality of the sound?

I have Windows XP running in parallels, so feel free to recommend any Windows only programs.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    k_munick_munic Posts: 357member
    by definition, a white noise contains randomly audio of ALL frequencies.. so, I have absolutely no clue, how you want to remove white noise from an audio source WITHOUT affecting the overall quality of the piece...??



    usually, for removing specific sounds, you use an equilizer with some high emphasis - but that is for specific freq, as a constant deep humming etc...



    http://www.bias-inc.com/products/soundsoappro/

    is some "intelligent" audio cleaner, you can teach it, what part of audio you want to be erased.. but a white noise... ?
  • Reply 2 of 8
    slugheadslughead Posts: 1,169member
    I've tried soundsoap, it's pretty good but it's probably not a good bet for music
  • Reply 3 of 8
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Neruda


    Can anyone recommend an audio cleaner program that doesn't degrade the quality of the sound?



    Unfortunately, there is no such thing. The best you can hope for is to minimize the degradation that will occur, and to get a convincing simulation of what the music behind the noise would sound like without that noise.



    I use Amadeus, but I've only played with it's noise reduction a little bit. To do a really good job on this kind of material (I gave that sample track you mentioned a listen), I can't recommend a specific product (I haven't been following this stuff lately), but I'd guess that you'd need some fairly sophisticated pro software. In my experience nearly all consumer-grade noise reduction is crap, often little more than a high-frequency filter.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    chris_herechris_here Posts: 47member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shetline


    In my experience nearly all consumer-grade noise reduction is crap.



    But if you ever go PRO, there's WAVES (http://www.waves.com/content.asp?id=2027) - costs a lot, worth the money.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chris_here


    But if you ever go PRO, there's WAVES (http://www.waves.com/content.asp?id=2027) - costs a lot, worth the money.



    I didn't spend enough time at the site to figure out all of the pricing schemes and pricing bundles, but it's $800 just for the noise-reduction plug-in, which has to plug into an even more expensive piece of software to do anything for you.



    A bit hard to justify for mere personal use. \
  • Reply 6 of 8
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    It's very difficult. The best result I got was to use Audacity and you can apply a filter to the audio. I used the RIAA set and it seemed to clean up almost all the noise but the sound was noticeably different. You can manually adjust the set but it would have been nice if you could dampen it.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    chris_herechris_here Posts: 47member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by shetline


    A bit hard to justify for mere personal use. \



    He didn't mention his financial background. Looks like you know more about the OP's situation than I do.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    try SoundHack (free, need stuffit expander to expand .hqx), whose documentation can be found here.



    It has a feature which can be used for noise reduction (see the documentation), I have no idea how it compares to Amadeus or Audacity but it's worth a shot.



    If you've got an uncompressed version of the track (for example from CD) use that as the source rather than using a compressed version.
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