Does anybody here use UNCHIRP?

[kidslow]

I use the offline method for this kind of editing (iZotope RX) - but I'm absolutely sure Unchirp is quite advanced and quite powerful.

Which tools in RX do you use to achieve what UNCHIRP does? I'm not entirely convinced of the uniqueness vs how much of it is marketing, but I wouldn't know how to tame RX into making the fixes that UNCHIRP purports to make.

I don't think there are any.

I just gave it a good workout. Someone came to me with 25 year old track that needed an instrumental version. First off, into Music Rebalance in RX. That was a mildy disappointing result - yes, the vocal was 98% gone, but in this case it sounded wibbly, lacked punch and various sibilances were still there.

So into UNCHIRP. I love the listen to I/O only mode, where you can really hear what it is doing. In my case, musical noise was the problem - it was all wibble. I turned that to 100%. Chirps didn't do anything, and the others tended to make things worse. But getting rid of that musical noise really helped, and I don't know how else I'd ever have done that. It wasn't magically perfect, but it was magically better.

I then put it through Kush's Clariphonic to restore a bit of high end and presence, Waves' Smack Attack to get some definition back that the Music Rebalance process lost and a bit of the L3-16 to tame things at the end. Finally back into RX to manually remove the remaining stray sibilances and clicks. The end result wouldn't be good enough for a commercial release in this case, but it's for a live show and I think it'll pass muster there.

Thanks for sharing. Just to follow-up on my own trials with UNCHIRP. I did give it a thorough demonstration. For the material I needed tamed, it did not help at all. I do not believe it suits dialogue or spoken word well, which was my primary use case. But in my search for material that would better suit UNCHIRP, I found this tutorial about Izotope RX on compressed interviews. Zynaptiq is even name-checked.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/tips-t ... rview.html

It supplied some audio files and a variety of interim tests to compare at various stages. The article's description of UNCHIRP as, "specifically designed to do nothing but remove artifacts of overzealous MP3 compression" is a somewhat accurate assessment of the use cases I could hear. If I had to do batch or repeated cleanup of overly compressed music, yes. I don't, typically, but that's where I heard the best improvements applying it. Just not something I need on a sustained basis. Certainly not at that price point.

I demo'ed Soothe at the same time, and found it a different beast entirely. Obviously because it is. Better for my dialogue and spoken word use cases, but I'm also not convinced I can't get there with what tools I already have. This thread did inspire me to put together some test cases and a test plan and take a few plugins for a spin, so that is a productive outcome.

[Boy Wonder]

Hmm. About ten years ago or so, I tried to restore the complete recordings of Robert Johnson using various tools from Waves and others. I'd say I was about 90% successful, but listening to all the tracks, you could still hear those distinctive noise artifacts left behind. Recently, Columbia released a new restoration of the recordings, but they were so hissy I preferred mine.

Reading through this forum makes me want to give Unchirp a looksee. Maybe it can succeed where the others didn't.

[Fleer]

It’s the artifact-remover par excellence IMO.

[noiseboyuk]

The article's description of UNCHIRP as, "specifically designed to do nothing but remove artifacts of overzealous MP3 compression" is a somewhat accurate assessment of the use cases I could hear. If I had to do batch or repeated cleanup of overly compressed music, yes. I don't, typically, but that's where I heard the best improvements applying it. Just not something I need on a sustained basis. Certainly not at that price point.

Yes, this is the key to it. It can't help on stuff that is, say, over-compressed in an audio-sense - it's talking about lossy codec compression, not audio compression.

That said, it's important to note that codec compression isn't the only way you can end up with these chirps and burbles. Other kinds of audio processing can produce these side effects, indeed such as Music Rebalance in RX. De-reverbs and other noise reduction are other potential problem sources. So as the years go by, it's probably less likely to be used to fix bad MP3s and more likely to be used in these other ways.