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Old November 8th, 2007, 08:04 PM
geezer geezer is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: Martinsburg, WV
Posts: 181
Adobe Audition Noise Removal!

So, here's a little story from some local work I did today that illustrates what I think the real problem is for updating and resurrecting MicroEditor:

I am transferring some Bach organ recordings for a man that his mother had recorded on 1/4 track tape 48 years ago. After putting a lot of effort into finding a functional playback machine (went through 3 before I got one that works) and a source for splicing and leader tape (only one in the US as far as I can tell), I transferred the recordings successfully into Wavelab. There was a lot of starting and stopping, and the levels were all over the place between different takes. All takes had relatively high 60cycle (120, 240, 480, etc) hum on the right side mostly, which really destroyed the stereo image and was loud enougnh to be beating noticably at times with bass notes from the organ.


On takes that were really quiet, I had the output of the tape machine cranked enough that the combined hum, tape noise and tape machine amplification noise were literally riding as high as -12DBFS!....and were often up at -30dbfs or higher.

I felt relatively sure, since the noise level was pretty constant for each take, that I could at least clean this up some.....If I had done this with the original DOS DNoise, this probably would have required at least an hour's worth of experimentation, then at least 2 passes of an hour's worth of processing for every few minutes of audio.....In addition, I don't know if I actually could have made it work that well for noise levels only 12db down from the max.

I checked through my Waves plugs, and realized I had not purchased their high end restoration tools. Before going on line with my credit card, I remembered that I had really thought highly of the Cool Edit noise removal, so I opened up my mostly idle Adobe Audition 2.0 to see if it still had that function built in.......The long and short of this experience is that I was able to get the noise out of every clip within 30 seconds (including defining the noise section and all processing) with 24 bit audio, and yielding a 32bit file. There was virtually no decision making on my part and no multiple passes needed, and the resultant files have virtually no loss of loudness or fidelity issues. They sound every bit as good (if not better)as the files I labored over all day with Dnoise in '96 or '97...Even the file with the -12 combined noise level! It literally sounds identical to the files with the noise down around -35......It was effortless, and I have never used the program before. I did not have to think at all, and the files are sitting in the same folder I started for the Wavelab project and will go effortlessly into the Wavelab CD Montage.

All this on my 5 year old laptop. How can MTU compete with this kind of software? Adobe Audition costs something like $250 on the street, and has the full multitrack/mixer thing going on.....It still doesn't seem to have the effortless, open-ended thing that MTU has, but Wavelab certainly does.

Am I missing something here? Is there some kind of business hole left for MTU to fit in?

I can't imagine what the Waves noise removal stuff is going to sound like. Yikes.
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