Need help recording tape to digital

[Cal D]

I have a recording that was recorded on a small tape recorder. there are two voices on the recording. one voice is quite loud (obviously was very close to the mic), the other is quite faint. In addition, the tape has a lot of hiss due to a poor quality tape used. Any advice on how to:
1) Make the faint voice clearer and louder and the loud voice fainter?

2) Clear up some of the hiss without degrading the voices?

Thanks so much!

 

[duck]

You would need some type of editing software like soundforge etc. to do this.
From what you describe it would take painstaking time to try to straighten it out even with the latest tools and the knowledge to use them.
I cant recommend software as I have never tried to do this.

 

[o-ron]

The noise reduction plug in built into Cool Edit will do a wonderful job of removing the hiss.

As far as making the faint voice louder, this will be nearly impossible given the way it was recorded. However, there are a few tricks you can try:

1.) Is each voice mixed more to one side? In other words, is one voice more left in the mix and the other more right? If so, then simply crank up the gain on the side which has the faint voice. The quality from doing this is not so good and you will lose some of the stereo imaging, but it should do the trick albeit it in a "dirty" way.

2.)If the above doesn't apply, then perhaps the voices are in different ranges? (ie one male voice and one female, or one tenor and one bass, etc.) If so, then use graphic EQ's to turn up the frequencies of the fainter voice and turn down the frequencies of the louder voice.

Good luck!

 

[AudioMaverick]

After the Tape Hiss reduction, go into the Dynamics Processor (located in Amplituded.

Once there choos a flat response curve, the select the Spline box.

For the louder voice --
Build a reduction curve (on the top right) to get a decent reduction in the high gain point.

For the quite voice --
This is going to be a little trickier to accomplish. But, start building a *bump* curve in the middle area (between -20dB and -50dB). Once you start hearing the effect, start reshaping the curve to enhance the voice. You can add quite a few anchor markers on the line to really tighten up the curve.

You will most likely need to go between the two settings a few times to get a decent balance. Here is a page I did to help explain the *Dynamics Processor* option in CEP... http://www.audiomaverick.com/tidbits/compansion.html

If all that doesn't work for you, you can toss it into the multitrack editor and manually adjust the gain line. It is tedious, but works.

 

[DanielJohn]

Audiomaverick,
He has all the voices in one wav. I don't think he will be able to edit it like that without adjusting both at the same time.
Although I could be wrong.
The only thing that I could suggest is that if they have different pitches in the voice to use the eq to edit the wave. But then again that would still be difficult. See if you can re-record them seperately. If possible, would be MUCH easier

-DAN