I should have specified this was a performance that is non-repeatable.

I need to try and salvage this performance - hence my question.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

If needed I can post an mp3 of a portion of the singer to give a better idea of what I'm talking about

That would help.
Can you make it a WAV file please?
That way, we know we're working with original bad source material, not compressed bad.

Mike

I grabbed a section of audio - please be gentle - I had little gear to work with at the time I shot this performance and was trying to make due with what I had available to me when I recorded this.

This clip is only about 5 seconds long and is an example of the issues I'm dealing with trying to clean it up enough for the singer - she understands there were issues out of my control (mixing board would not function properly when patched in to my camera so I had to use my wireless lav near the speaker just to get any half way decent audio and she wasn't comfortable wearing the lav itself).

She still wants a copy of her performance that I shot on video which this audio clip is taken from. I'd like to get it cleaned up as much as possible - I don't use Sound Forge much other than using the Noise Reduction tool so any hints as to what to use to clean this up in SF9 would be appreciated.

I have since ordered a Zoom H2 to use as a backup to reduce the chance of this happening again.

The wav file can be downloaded here - it's about 5 seconds long rendered out 44khz 16bit and about 1MB in size.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

Well, there is noise, crackling and the high end sounds like the mic was cutting off at 5k. You might try the "click and scratch" removal several times then take a small tiny sample of the high freq noise only and run it through the noise reduction in forge. Sometimes the peak restoration will help. I am doubtfull that you can improve the track.
JJK

This sounds like sound I got from a wireless that was at the edge of its range (and the antenna wasn't all the way up).

Unfortunately, the distortion is "buried" in the audio, so there is not much you can do -- even with Izotope RX -- to miraculously recover good audio. However, if you can live with some loss of the highs, you can make it less obnoxious by using the following in Sound Forge:

Normalize (this makes the following plugins work a little better, but is not necessary)

Click & Crackle Removal (Sensitivity 20; Click shape 7; Max click 2.8; Noise level high;

Vinyl restoration (Click removal 20; Reduce noise 28; Affect frequencies 2900; Attack & Release 7 for both; Noise floor -50)

This resulted in this:

"Repaired" file

Link good for seven days.

Like I said, this is no miracle, and in fact still sounds pretty bad. However, the scratches don't jump out and "grab you by the throat" anymore.

[Edit] I just noticed the other post about peak restoration and thought I would add that I tried this (it was the first thing I tried), both in Sound Forge, and the better version found in iZotope RX, and neither made any difference on this particular file, no matter where I set the threshold and no matter how I pre-equalized the audio (you sometimes have to boost the audio in order to make the iZotope de-clipper work). However, the idea is quite valid and often works great. It just doesn't work on this particular audio.

I took the previous file I posted and performed two more operations. First, I used the Sound Forge "Smooth/Enhance" function and set it all the way to Smooth (-5). This makes the sound very muffled, but it gets rid of much of the residual badness.

I then used an old version of the Nero Wave Editor. It normally isn't very useful, but there is one plugin that it has called "Band Extrapolation" that does a very nice job of enhancing the missing highs. Much better than just applying EQ (I use it to enhance audio from old VHS tapes that use the linear audio track, before Hi-Fi VHS audio).

Here's the result:

Additional Processing

Still nothing to write home about, but better.