A rolling blogpost on audio repair, the job everyone dreads but has to be done. The idea is that I’ll come back here regularly to post tips, advice and approaches on how to repair and ‘improve’ a specific audio recording. Note the ”, as many will say, you can’t really polish a poorly recorded recording. However, you can definitely make certain elements less distracting and attenuate them to the point that the casual listener will not notice them.
Unsurprisingly I’ll be using iZotope RX and we’ll be mostly focusing on that on this page.
A guide to de-noising sounds
Three useful shortcuts, t for time, f for frequency and r for both
Use the de-wind module in conjunction with the brush tool to remove wind frequencies using laser precision
If a gap is left, use the copy, paste frequency to fill in the missing frequency content
If you’re dealing with recurring noise from gear, eg noise pre-amps, create a library folder where you have the highest possible quality sample of that noise. Use this in conjunction with the spectral de-noise tool to remove surgically the noise from your recordings.
Izotope tends to edit destructively. A good way to approach the material is:
Edit first—> Remove general continuous audio issues (eg buzz or hiss)—> Remove intermittent audio issues (eg, wind gust, something coming in and out of recording