Reducing hiss on your tracks...

John Ellison IV · Post by **John Ellison IV** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 9:24 pm

I have a bunch of songs that I recorded on my analog 4-track that I transferred to my PC and there is some hiss on the songs. How do I reduce it or get rid of the hiss?

Neil C · Post by **Neil C** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 10:10 pm

There are several 'pro' audio restoration utilities (that do things like hiss and crackle reduction) that I know of that are around the £600 mark (Waves, Sony, Bias). The cheapest one I know is Bias Sound Soap which i've seen for £72. <a href="http://www.bias-inc.com/products/soundsoap/" target="_blank">http://www.bias-inc.com/products/soundsoap/</a> I haven't used any of them.

aleph · Post by **aleph** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 10:40 pm

you can use a dobly system(dbx are well knowned) on your analog rec;hard to find but its neccessary to increase dynamic on small analog rec like is probably yours it had sometimes a small compression on your sound i found it on mine really nice. i think the better way to reduce tape hiss is to reduce it on your recorder.

Post by **interruptor** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 2:24 pm

A few years back i bought the audio editor "soundforge" because it has a built-in noise-reduction feature which works quite ok. actually the noise reduction plug-in can be bought separately for $280. There is also a free trial version: <a href="http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Produc ... asp?PID=14" target="_blank">see the webpage</a> i first worked with the trial version which lasts a week and later decided to get the whole program

Post by **interruptor** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 2:40 pm

in the meantime there may be more advanced noise reduction tools. i heard that wavelab has a noise reduction plug-in which works in realtime. <a href="http://www.computervideo.net/nov04-5.html" target=_top>comparison wavelab/soundforge here</a>

John Ellison IV · Post by **John Ellison IV** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 4:37 am

What freeware is available for reducing hiss?

Post by **interruptor** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 9:10 am

i don't know of any freeware hiss reduction.. here's a search on kvr-vst which shows some vst noise reduction plugs <a href="http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=re ... =1&rpp=100" target="_blank">starting from 70$</a>

Dub Attack Force · Post by **Dub Attack Force** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 5:20 pm

Audacity can reduce the noise and is free.. The latest version of Audacity (I'm using the Linux one) is very good... noise reduction works OK if your recording is at 96khz and you use the noise reduction very lightly. I sometimes record to tape and then sample this with a PC, and proceed to clean it up a bit with Audacity.