Advice on restoring old family recordings

[herbaltree]

I'm looking for advice on some old family recordings of music originally recorded in the 1950's and early 60's. The sound quality is really poor with huge distortion, noise and pitch variation problems. The original tapes are not available, I just have transfers that were made to CD at some point.

I'd like to see what can be done with them. What do people think? I'd consider having a go myself with the right software, or it might be better and cheaper to have it done professionally.
Any advice - either on software, or recommendations on who to approach appreciated.

There is some singing with piano accompaniment, and one recording is of a full orchestral piece.

[kidslow]

First, set your expectations low on what is possible. The noise floor is easiest to address, as are clicks and crackles and such. Acon Restoration suite is on sale right now at VST Buzz. That would be a cheap way for you to see what is within the realm of possibility on your own. The Acon de-click / de-crackle plugin is first rate. It's not going to bring back the dead, but that would be a place to start. Next level would be Izotope Rx and some of the spectral tools in there. Depending on how much time you want to spend, going through slowly, methodically by hand with a spectral editor is going to get the best results. The secret seems to be to iterate with many light passes of a variety of tools. I have no idea what it would cost to do professionally, but doubt it would be cheap to do it well.

[resynthesis]

Do you own any appropriate software for the job? Is the pitch variation a wow kind of thing? Software can be expensive for this kind of thing. I like Acon software but I don't think it has the tools to address the pitch variation. Izotope RX does as does Celemony Capstan but you'll certainly pay for the pleasure. For a one-off job it may be worth paying somebody to do it otherwise you'll be making a major investment (Capstan costs over £4k as I remember but was available on a weekly rental basis).

[CrystalWizard]

Really depends on multiple factors:
1. how much do you want to spend which is probably a result of,
2. how many recordings are you going to work on
3. how much time do you want to put into it
I used Izotope Rx and adobe Audion (old version so same as Cool Edit Pro) for years. You can often make a recording passable with 15-20mns of work but to really make it sound CD OR LP worthy it can take hours of fine editing, as said with the spectral tools. Plus, Rx isn't cheap although there's all kindsa sales nowadays.

[muki]

(Capstan costs over £4k as I remember but was available on a weekly rental basis).

seems to be 5 day rent only from what i can see
https://www.celemony.com/en/capstan
https://shop.celemony.com/cgi-bin/WebOb ... lemonyShop

[kentokento]

AUTO-ADMIN: Non-MP3, WAV, OGG, SoundCloud, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Facebook links in this post have been protected automatically. Once the member reaches 5 posts the links will function as normal.

Of course depending on your budget, the first engineer that came to my mind is Jessica Thompson who is based out of San Francisco. She has done pretty amazing things with audio restoration, and the mastering the restored audio...might be worth reaching out to receive a quote: https://www.jessicathompsonaudio.com/ (https://www.jessicathompsonaudio.com/)

[Dirk Diggler]

Izotope RX or other modern AI based solutions tend to work pretty well these days.
They give great suggestions and places to start.

Good luck,
Dirk

[herbaltree]

Thanks for all your replies everyone.

Seeing Acon Restoration on sale is what prompted me to look into this, so that looks to be a good starting point.

One challenge will be the varying pitch which can be extreme, as if the tape was stretched or a mechanical fault with the player. I see you can trial Izotope rx, so will experiment with the wow and flutter, and variable pitch modes.

Thanks again - especially for the advice to keep my expectations low.

[GMDuss]

I've just been hired to transfer a bunch of 7-inch reels of tape dating from between around 1968 and 1979 for a man. The tapes are all different brands, and the recordings were made at speeds 1 7/8, 3 1/3 and 7 1/2 ips. They consists of a mix of off-air recordings (Boston stations) and family recordings. The reel I have to do next has mold on it... Now I do 'some' of this work professionally, so here's what I can say:

1) Your goal has got to be realistic.
A low level recording at 1 7/8 ips is going to be hideously hissy even if the recording "beneath" the noise is good. At a high to high a level, the distortion will be outrageous, and it really can't be un-distorted. This is going to be true at any speed of recording, but 1 7/8 is my current worse-case.
Hiss and hum reduction is much easier with dialog than with music. Keep this in mind.

2) Click reduction is pretty good and pretty easy these days. ACON works great.

3) Crackle reduction is not as good.

4) IZotope RX is literally your best friend, as far as I'm concerned. The visualization alone is a huge help.

5) Dealing with extreme pitch wow is a pain. I have no experience with Capstan, but good-old Sound Forge has manual tools that can deal with this. The only sort of automatic system I know that can really deal with this is the Plangent system, which is very high end and proprietary. Mastering engineer Dave Glasser at Airshow Mastering in Colorado is a "master" at using this system. He has mastered a few albums I produced and I can tell you that he is a phenomenal engineer, a great guy and his prices are reasonable.

GD