How to clean up distorted audio?

Sebaz wrote on 2/1/2010, 5:22 AM

A friend of mine left her camera on a tripod while recording a dinner with her family and it seems that by accident she set the mic level to manual, so the whole track is really loud, and at times it's heavily distorted. I know that cleaning that up to a decent level would be impossible, but is there a plugin for Vegas or any other software that can smooth it so it doesn't sound so bad?

Comments

Skuzzy wrote on 2/1/2010, 6:05 AM

Is it clipped from the gain being too high? Or is it over-saturated from the microphone not being able to handle the decibel levels?

If you like, I can take a look at the audio. I am inbetween projects at the moment. I use Adobe Audition, with a myriad of plugins, for almost all of my audio work.

Bill Ravens wrote on 2/1/2010, 6:16 AM

SoundForge has a number of tools to try. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. It has a clipped peak restoration tool which usually doesn't help much.I've had the best luck by applying a compressor to the audio. You will need to play with the threshhold tool to roll off all the audio that exceeds clipped portions. As you might expect, you won't get "normal" audio with this approach, but, it will be a lot more intelligible.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/1/2010, 6:47 AM

iZotope RX

TLF wrote on 2/1/2010, 12:07 PM

I'll second what Jay says.

That software is incredible when it comes to declipping. It's not perfect, but I've yet to find any other software that comes close to being able to restore clipping - digital or analogue - so well.

Expensive though.

Skuzzy wrote on 2/1/2010, 12:32 PM

Yep. I have been using iZotope's plugins for quite a long time now. Good stuff.