Audacity alternative for mastering & vinyl restoration/mastering?

[GaryG]

I'm a fan of Sound Forge, Wavosaur and iZotope RX. And I had heard good things about Soundop.

old skool as it is, I'm still using Wavosaur for general editing and splitting. I guess I'm just used to it but nothing quicker for splitting, say, vinyl or a radio show, the auto split just seems more reliable for most purposes (certainly works better for me than something like the dynamic split in Reaper).

So yay for Wavosaur

[DJMaytag]

Yeah, there seems to be a pretty clear gap between an app for audio editing and an app for mastering… or maybe Wavelab is what I should have gone with all along? I just have seriously bad juju over how unstable Cubase was on previous machines to want to ever buy another Steinberg product.

[DJMaytag]

Currently working on a file with loads of deep clicks and pops, to the point that de-click & de-crackle plugins would destroy vital transient information to be able to respond to those defects in the vinyl.

[osiris]

It will work. I did the Boris Midney Evita album which was very bad. Only lost a bit of fidelity at the start. I never liked the pop and click algorithm so I just zoomed and made microcuts where the pops and clicks were.

[DJMaytag]

Acoustica is doing a bang-up job on those micro cuts, for sure.

[Tj Shredder]

I used to work on Sonic Solutions, which was the one tool all restauration professionals used. That was more than 20 years ago. The manual declicking was the king. You can do things like that in Acoustica or RX, with a more complicated workflow but better results…

[osiris]

I had Audacity for awhile and then I get this box pop up that says I need to Register. Anyone else get that?

[tgryner5tn5686b3456b]

RX and Spectralayers are probably your best options if you want to restore something that was originally on vinyl, or really do any kind of forensic repairs to an audio file. I slept on RX for far too long, and now I use it all the time when a client sends me a recording that has flaws. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it doesn't take an onerous amount of time and effort to figure out the 80/20. It's pretty much Photoshop for audio. You can erase/fade/copy/paste/interpolate audio however you want in the time/amplitude/frequency dimensions, so you can zoom in on just the frequencies of a transient click in a vocal recording and attenuate them without mucking up the actual vocals going on at the same time. Very handy for creative stuff as well, like drawing/erasing freehand in the spectral image of the audio file in order to generate wacky results.

[seismic1]

I used Goldwave to digitise my old vinyl in 2007. I think there is an evaluation version, good for 30 days, a one-year license for $19, and a lifetime license for $59.

It did a good job, although I had to tweak settings for different types of source material.