Hissyfit!

[teb]

Im making digital copies of songs from a bootleg tape of one of our 1975 concerts. They were originally recorded by a college student with a smuggled-in cassette recorder in his coat and the mics hidden in his gloves, sitting on the front railing of the hall's balcony. My old copies of the tape are on 8-tracks and I have the deck plugged into my Korg digital deck. After that, I'm transfering them to the computer. For third generation, glove-filtered cuts from a couple of mics just picking up the sound out in the middle of the hall, the quality is outstanding, but it would be nice to be able to get rid of the tape hiss, or at least reduce it. I've tried several free demo downloads of noise-reduction programs to see how they would do and though they will remove the hiss, so far they have all left behind something that sounds worse in the process - some sort of unnatural tone, distortion, etc. Does anybody have any ideas of something that might reduce the hiss without ruining the music?

Here's a sample cut without any noise reduction in case you want to hear the hiss. On a 32 year old tape, recorded under less than ideal conditions maybe it's too much to expect a really clean result, but the quieter passages would be nicer without all that tape noise.

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... spirit.mp3

[jps]

Try these guys:

http://www.cedaraudio.com/products/camb ... amnr4.html

They have been doing this NR thing for a long time, plus they have other great products for audio processing.

[teb]

Sounds interesting. Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't find anything on their site which explained where to get this software?

[jps]

Try [email protected].

[brammy]

"one of our 1975 concerts"... sorry for being ignorant here Todd, but which band was that?

[tony_carey]

Todd....a very simple, cheap & normally effective unit is the Bheringer SNR2000. I have one of these & a Drawmer SNR unit & they both work very well indeed......maybe worth a try.

[teb]

You're not ignorant Kent - It was a rather obscure folk/rock band called "The Ship", based out of Illinois in the early '70's. Jeff Rath is about the only person I know of who actually admits to having seen us play. I have about ten live clips that I'm working with which are the songs that aren't messed up by the direction changes and their resulting clunks that the old 8-track "master"tape makes. My web space is tiny and currently loaded up with work drawings and photos, so at the moment there are only the sample clip listed above up there and one other, but it will give you an idea of the hiss problem. A few also have a little bit of a phasing thing going on, but it seems to be coming from the 30 year old original tape and I doubt that I can do anything about it. In any case, a fair-quality copy is better than none at all. This one tends to phase in and out in places.

http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... 0U%20N.mp3

I'm also finding that my tinnitus is generally bad enough that even if I get rid of the noise I can't hear that it's gone - which isn't helping (you definitely don't want me doing the mixing on your next album).

There is a bootleg website which somebody notified me of a while back where you can download the original Elektra album of The Ship (the folk opera thing that we originally started with). My first reaction was "hey, that's illegal!" but after I thought about it I decided that it was actually kind of nice that a few people were still getting enjoyment from it so many years later. I've corresponded a little bit with and the guy who runs the site and he seems like a pretty decent fellow.

http://akashaman.blogspot.com/2007/01/s ... ey-71.html

Thanks Tony, I'll check into the Bheringer (maybe I can hook one up to my ears, too. All I need is a high frequency notch-filter)

[brammy]

http://cgi.ebay.com/THE-SHIP-A-CONTEMPO ... dZViewItem

[teb]

It's probably warped after 35 years. I know I am!
Some other seller has a copy of my book listed, so you can even do an eBay double-play.
http://cgi.ebay.com/BOOK-NEW-Canoe-Rig- ... dZViewItem

It's really annoying to spend hours drawing nice graphics and then to see what people do with them in the name of advertising. If a horizontal cover drawing doesn't fit the space, no problem. We'll just stretch it into a vertical format! As Bugs Bunny once said, "What a Maroon".