Digitizing from cassette

[Sharon Hooley]

Hi all!

I'm working on a project, digitizing library books. I'm able to get
rid of a lot of unwanted noise, send them to Levelator to try to even
out volume, and amplify (though I don't understand everything about
that). My problem is that these tapes can be of poor quality, as
they were made from volunteer readers. Sometimes they're clear
enough to hear, other times they have spots where the volume goes way
down and it sounds muffled. Sometimes the speech is overlapped a bit
when a reader stops, then starts again. Is there anyway I can
improve quality so that it sounds more professional?

Thanks!

Sharon

[Michael Moran]

You would need an audio editing program such as sound forge.  There something's that can not be fixed especially if the oxide is coming off the tape.

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[Sharon Hooley]

I'm using Audacity and Levelator.  Are the others like Sound Forge better?  I actually have Sonar on my desktop music system, but I just wanted to keep it simple on my laptop.

Thanks again,

sharon

[Michael Moran]

If the tape is damaged there is only so much you can do.  See if you can get the hiss out a little.  See if you can cut frequencies from 8,000 HZ and above.  Then try to bring out the midrange by boosting around 1,500 HZ.  Don't drive yourself crazy because There isn't very much you will fix that will make that much of a difference.

If you want you can send me a small clip and I will send it back to you and show you how much it can be fixed if I can do anything at all.

[Katie Crocker]

Sharon,

I use sound forge and find that it works reasonably well at this.  I'm not familiar with Audacity, but is there a way to normalize the file?  This is what I would use to do this.  

Good luck, let us know what you come up with.

Katie

Sent from my iPhone

[Paul Hopkins]

I'd probably record the whole thing to SoundForge (in my case) Do as
Mike said and go through the digital file manually having normalised
to see if the lower volumes were worth bringing up. I just go by ear
if I'm having to play with volumes manually, com0paring the manually
adjusted ones to the overall volume I had created in the normalising
process.

Unfortunately, to a large extent, it is true that your adjustments to
improve things are dependent on the quality of the original audio.

I too am happy to look at a small sample to see if I can help further.

Thanks.

Paul Hopkins

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