How do I clean up an old recording?

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Torfinn

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I have a record that was recorded by my dad in the mid 1950's. It appears to be a 33 1/3speed master copy as it is made out of metal and in addition to the center hole it has 3 other holes equally spaced about 3/" from the center of the disk. As far as I know it is the only copy still in existence (there were only four copies made I think). My father and his freinds were singing as a quartet and decided to record themselves so they got the money together and made the record. It has eight songs on it.

The problem is that the record has lots of pops and crackles in it. What I want to do is clean up the noise and then put it on cd. I am willing to spend the money to have it cleaned up if it is not too expensive. I just don't know how to do it or where to take it to.

any help or advice would be much appreciated. :)
 
Yo Finn of Tora Tora Tora: [I hate dating myself.]

You CAN GET YOUR RECORD cleaned-up. I'm sure the CIA has electronics to do that kind of stuff; but, in reality, some studio out there or some home studio has to have editing programs that can partially clean up your treasure.

I'd ask around; but, someone on this site should give you some information.

I've enhanced "flat-dead" CD's made by my friends in my studio but I don't have the kind of editing plugs you need. Someone should know where to point you.

Good luck,
Green Hornet
 
2 things:1st,there are software items out there specifically designed to clean up old records,I believe one is called Spin Doctor and I think the other one is called Denoiser or something.Don't remember who makes 'em,tho...Other thing: not 100% sure about this,but to be on the safe side,avoid playing that disc until you have the stuff set up to do the actual digital transfer of it 'cause it may not have been intended to be played but rather used to press other copies and playing it may mess it up even worse.Cheers!
 
virtual.ray

Thanks for the advice, I don't ever play it. I do not think that my parents even knew what it was, to them it was just another record with 3 extra holes in it. :) I didn't know what it was when I got it (about 20 years ago) so I just sampled it at that time and stored it with the intent to record it later. I just recently pulled it out because I would like to clean it up and put it on cd as an aniversery present for them. So now that I know a little bit more than I did then I am sure that it is some kind of a master copy.
 
There are a few shareware pgms for pop and snaps, Most you will find are demo feature limit and give you 100 sec's or less of use this one works but you will have to adjust it so it don't destroy your recording its called Depopper http://www.droidinfo.com.br Spin dr comes packaged with adaptec 4.0 cool edit 2000 has a pretty good restoration plugin for it also The recording you have is a master clean it up real good it should get rid of a few pops.
 
I like Formula 409 myself....:D

Or a good scrub brush and Comet can do wonders for cleaning things....:D

Now, joking aside.

If you expect to preserve the original fidelity, and not have some pretty weird sounding stuff going on as a result of bad software coding messing up the audio, I might suggest that you take the master to a studio that uses either a ProTools, Sadie, Soundscape, or Sonic Solutions system. It is going to cost you at least $50 an hour to have them do their magic, but the results will be more stunning then what you can do with the cheaper plugin's. I have played around with a few of the plugin's and software mentioned and was not really impressed with the bad side of it's processing. The real kicker is that a lot of it didn't work all that well anyway.

Good luck. And what a nice present to consider for your parents.

Ed
 
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