I'll give it a try, Jerry. Got a lot of experience in audio restoration so I'll see what I can do.

Kent

This is a first try at it, let me know what you think. Using eq and a tiny bit of spacial expansion.
I have used a gate to reduce noise at the start, that may or may not be a good idea. Thats easy to change.
download http://cuenet.co.uk/sony/BanjoHere[/link]

Paul.

I'll give it a go this evening. I don't have Izotope, but I can make "some" improvement in SF7.

Here's a result from two passes in iZotope RX2, using the highest quality settings:

iZotope Denoised

I made no attempts to re-time the audio -- if you have Vegas 10 or 11, you can use the marvelous "Elastique" to change speed, with or without pitch correction. Also, I didn't make any attempt to synthesize the "missing" higher end frequencies, something that can sometimes add a little "snap" to something like a banjo. iZotope can be set to do a simple noise gate, but as you'll hear, it also can be set (as it was here) to remove some of the noise even during the playing of the banjo.

Guys - you're wonderful! Keep them coming.

Although I can hear the hiss, pops & noise in the original, I'm completely tone deaf. Pitch? Isn't that something they do in baseball?

In any case, keep these submissions coming. I'll send them all to my friend (who is also a musician) and let him pick the one he likes the best.

I'll report the winner back here. The prize is free Mercalli stabilization & web help (although, as I mentioned in the first post, everyone gets that!).

TIA,
...Jerry

btw: Here's my submission: JamesVSage-Jerry.zip (noise reduction & audio restoration tools in SF9)

Lots of choices - always good!

here's another, similar to the first one but i removed compression, it didnt need any! This has a bit more depth. Right im done...Good luck.
http://cuenet.co.uk/sony/banjo%20EQ%20and%20gate.zipEQ and Gate[/link]

Paul.

The repeat of the introduction doesn't sound like natural echo or reverb, but rather like "print through" from a previous tape wrap. Sounds like a tape recording from a record. Did you get the sound as a tape? If it was transfered to tape long ago, the tape could have stretched a bit when being played on some old drives, slowing the music down a bit. There seems to be a fair amount of high frequency noise like tape hiss or the noise from high gain amplifiers.

@paul_w

Good work on gating out the noise on the music in the first submission! On the introduction it was a little disconcerting to hear all background noise completely disappear. I expect to here some noise in an old piece.

Im using EQ alone to repair the music, and reduce hiss. But yes i agree, the gate is a bit extreme and goes to zero noise!. Will do a version without gate, so then it should sound more authentic.

Paul.

http://www.powerplantonline.com/Sage/JamesVSage_RX.zip

Hope I inserted the link correctly. See if this helps. Got rid of a lot of noise and the print-through on the voice introduction. I did my best to not alter the overall timbre of the performance, but added a bit of multi-band compression to bring out the attack from the banjo skin. A very nice performance.

Larry

Given the vintage it was probably recorded by directly cutting a disk, tape really didn't happen until the 1940s, I think wire recorders might have been around in 1938 but were not all that common. Given the vintage of the recording it's in very good condition, I've had to deal with much worse, like a transfer from acetate done with the wrong sized needle that must have been bottoming out onto the aluminium base, yuck, yuck, yuck.
Probably the "echo" is from print through, if so then at least the tape was wound the right way for storage.

I was going to run it through iZotopes Rx but as JM has already done that no point two of us doing the same thing. The main thing I'd see as vital is getting rid of the low frequency hum. I doubt that used to worry anyone decades ago, the amplifiiers and speakers that most could afford back then couldn't reproduce it. Today with many people having "subs" it is can be really offensive.

Bob.

Jerry - Didn't try to do anything with speed. This is with noise removal, vacuum tube declipping, and virtual valve enhancement. Didn't try to do anything with the speed. Sounds like some acetate cut noise and there was definitely a tape involved somewhere as you can hear the phasing from track to track as the tape weaves over the heads. Hope I got the link right.

http://honkytonkcountrytv.com/page20.html

atom12,

I was blown away by the quality of what you did. Which tool did you use?

Agreed, sounds like a cut disc then tranfered to mag tape at some point, we here crackles 'and ' print through.

Right i was going to try a total gate removal version but changed my mind. This is still gated as before but i mixed in some sampled genuine background noise during the gated sections, at a reduced level of course. Should stop the gate sounding like an off switch!

http://cuenet.co.uk/sony/banjo%20EQ%20with%20gate%20and%20background.zipGate, EQ and added background[/link]

Paul.

Opampman, can't open your link here.

Paul.

Yup, somethings up with the pitch:

"Arkansas Traveler" Annie & Mac Old Time Music Moment[/link]

He's using a capo on the 2nd fret and the recording is a whole tone lower than this.

Paul.

Hmmmm.works fine for me in IE and Chrome.

Kent

"I was blown away by the quality of what you did. Which tool did you use?"atom12, Whoa!! I'm also blown away. What's the secret?

...Jerry

And my final pitch corrected version.
http://cuenet.co.uk/sony/banjopitch corrected version[/link]

Notice how the intro voice now sounds correct, it was too low before. And of course the music is now in the correct pitch.

Paul.

John, Jerry - Thanks. Audio was my first love. I used Izotope RX for broadband noise removal, then went to Sound Forge. Waves C4 for a bit of long attack compression at 600-1kHz to bring up the banjo skin and then used Izotope's Multi-band Expander to put a roll-off on 4 bands so the noise would fade with the decay of the audio. Altering the threshold for each band keeps it from sounding like a gate, as the highs roll off first , then mids, then lows.

Hope it can work for you. Got me out of the editing suite for a little bit today.

Larry

I also will add that Sony/Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction can sometimes do a better job with fewer artifacts than Izotope, but if you have a source with much wow/flutter it can lose the noise profile at times. Izotope seems more forgiving in that respect.

Nice work Larry, you really got rid of the noise.
Hearing some phasing or wooshing in the audio, probably fine for TV but on the studio monitors its quite evident. Could that be supressed further? But hey, overall, its impressive. Nice job.

Paul.

Yup, atom12's restoration beats anything I was able to do in SF7
In addition to wideband NR I'm amazed at the amount of distortion in the 1.5-3 kHz range he was able to remove while preserving the (few) audio frequencies that exist.
Congratulations!

Of course, Jerry's already done some really nice Mercalli stabilization for me, so I still owe him one . . .

In case Santa's listening, I want VisLM, Izotope, and Mercalli, in any order.