Effects doing the opposite of distortion/destruction? "Making audio beautiful"?

[Aloysius]

How about adding loads of 'odd harmonics' to a source that has loads of 'even harmonics'?

[kevvvvv]

Simplest way to beautify a sound is to apply heavy treble cut.

Don't look at the khz display. Just cut and cut until it sounds, well, beautiful.

Cheap fix. Try it

[Chris-S]

Some kind of distortions (like tanh saturation) can be undone be applying the inverse function.

But I'm not aware of any plugins doing this.

[CinningBao]

I'm not on Win so can't test but you could have a look at this - Terry West's ReLife plugin

http://www.terrywest.nl/utils.html

"Bring back life to a heavy clipped audiofile.
Revolutionary way to recover transients and lost peaks."

[Michael L]

Also check out Moodal, a resonator effect.

A more expensive but hands-on way is to separate the 'beauty' from the "noise" using spectral filters, such as the iZotope Iris synth or RX effect plugins; granular timestretch FX like Ircam TS or PaulStretch (you don't need to stretch); or Melodyne Studio. They are all great ways to see harmonics.

[Googly Smythe]

Aren't the likes of DeEdger (via TDR site) and Brainworx's Refinement designed for this kind of thing?
Although, speaking as a guitarist, you can't have too much distortion.

[pixel85]

As Distortion usually add harmonics opposite to this would be something that is removing harmonics from source signal. Ideal way to achieve this is to make music from pure sine waves

In more serious answer LowPass Filter and peak EQ filters with narrow Q is what's on my mind when I'm thinking about reducing distortion

[Jafo]

Apply SPEAR or anything else that decompiles audio into its component sines. Grovel through the result, deleting or attenuating harmonics and additions you don't like. Curse at the grubbiness and slowness of doing it correctly. Recompile.

[Firebird]

Harmonic enhancers. Try it!

True, different types of harmonic distortion perform differently.
Transistor distortion is more destructive and brittle.

Vintage tube distortion is more harmonic and soft.
Every hardware tube or tape unit is somewhat different as are the emulations.

The "opposite" to distortion, maybe distortion...
(even vs odd harmonics)

[Jedinhopy]

Applying distortion to something that sounds natural,
will not make it sound natural again when the distortion is removed on the audio file.
It will simply sound digital and synthetic instead of distorted.

[Armagibbon]

Hey I like my ugly shit to stay ugly!

Wanna un-ugly something? You're gonna sacrifice fidelity no matter what you do so just go granular or go heavy on the verb. Smudge that shit up, let the eq and envelopes sort it out.

[ghettosynth]

I like to add distortion to make things sound beautiful, but, well, that's me.

[Vertion]

Some solutions:
1. Low Pass Filter.
2. Spectrum Manipulation (Spectralayers Pro, etc)
3. Heavily trained neural network (Audio Analogies style)

[VariKusBrainZ]

You need to try noitrotsid, its perfect for this

[Michael L]

You need to try noitrotsid, its perfect for this

. Yes, it applies the inverse function, as described above. Airwondows does a great job!