Izotope RX - is it worth it?

[counterparty]

This afternoon I went and recorded some sounds.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/o8oxmfjxl ... s.zip/file

I'm sorry about all the horrible fake 'start download' adverts on the mediafire page - be very careful what you click on.

Do what you will with them - use them for whatever purpose.

There are some from inside - I would be especially interested in what you think of the ‘Clock’ one in terms of background noise and so on.

I thought it would be interesting to go to some well-known places and record the ambience, but I got to Piccadilly Circus and some guy was hammering out Ed Sheeran’s greatest hits over a huge amp, so I gave up on that (although there is one from near there in the zip). There’s one called ‘Ambient Outside’, which is from outside near where I live, one from a main road near there and one from a busy junction. The ‘Tube Station’ one is also quite nice.

[noiseboyuk]

counterparts - I just did a quick 5-10 min pass of the clock effect in RX - https://www.dropbox.com/s/gzo1ih46cch92 ... x.wav?dl=0 . First a basic HPF set very low, about 80z just to get rid of the most obvious rumble, then basic spectral noise reduction, sampling a bit of general atmos and reducing heavily throughout, about 18db I think it was. What this left was a lot of LF handling noise, which is the main problem with the recording (buy a little tripod!). De-plosive caught most of the big stuff, and I manually removed a half a dozen more in different frequency ranges using spot replace.

After about 15s the handling noise became more intrusive and near-constant in the sub 500hz range, much more subtle than before but still annoying so I did a cheat that I'm doing more and more these days - I copy and pasted part of a frequency range. In this case, that was below 500hz from the first 15s onto the rest, being careful to line up the ticks. To be honest, if it were me I'd be tempted to roll of sub 500hz completely and then its totally clean, though you miss just a bit of body. It would take a few mins more to forensically do this to all the space, not clicks and you could use the copy and paste trick again to speed that up. After manually fixing just a few more tiny noises I left, that would be a totally clean and full range effect.

This is a fairly typical example I'd say - nothing too bad, and the longer you spend on it the better you can get it. A pretty wide variety of tools is common too, its sadly rare that just one tool will fix everything in one hit. In this case it was EQ, Spectral Noise Reduction, De-plosive, Manual Spectral Repair, Copy and Paste.

[counterparty]

Thanks so much! I'm going to use the RX demo on the other files that I recorded and let this thread slip away (you've given me so much help, it feels like it's getting into spoon-feeding territory!)

Maybe I will start another more general thread about field recording technique in the production section once I've worked through these examples.

Thanks again!

[noiseboyuk]

No problem at all counterpary - like anything the more you use it the better you'll get at knowing what tool will work well and finding your own workflows. I only realised in the past year or so that copy and paste is as powerful as it is, sounds like the crudest tool but when you are just working on specific frequencies it can be a godsend.

[MogwaiBoy]

NoiseboyUK to the rescue - what a champ