Restoration of a 1942 song by my grandmother

I am trying to restore a recording of a song written and performed by my grandmother in 1942. It was recorded on a 10 inch, mono, 78 RPM shellac disk (too bad she didn’t have SONAR). The disk was played on my modern turntable at 45 RPM and input to a stereo audio track in SONAR. I then did a time/pitch adjustment to account for the difference between 45 & 78.

As would be expected from a recording like this, the voice and piano are buried in noise. I’ve tried some filtering and other processing but was wondering if any experts could give me their advice.

Here are the links to a short clip of the song. They contain only part of the first verse since the intent is to give you just an idea of what I am dealing with. The wave file is 5.0 MB and is a clip cut from the actual SONAR project. The MP3 file is exactly the same clip but smaller in size (583KB) due to MP3 compression.

http://216.194.91.30/song/contented.mp3
http://216.194.91.30/song/contented.wav

I would suggest downloading the wave file only if you intend to do a little experimenting yourself.

absolutly agree with "b rock" Find someone with a 78 rpm turntable and stylus to playback yourr disk. trying to time shift will just add in too many artifacts.

Soundforge "Noise Reduction" has vinyl restoration plus many more possibilities.
I have Soundforge "Noise Reduction" and would be willing to try processing your wave file if you can get it recorded via a 78rpm turntable

Fred

B Rock and Fred are both right about re-sampling the record at its proper RPM. If you have Cool Edit/Audition, it has it's own Noise Reduction filters that allow you to map a noise profile by selecting a section of just noise (like the lead-in) and apply that profile to the audio. This effectively removes the noise but leaves the audio virtually untouched. Then use a mastering plugin like Ozone to liven it up.

I recently did this to an old and very noisy 1/2 inch 8-track master with excellent results.

There's also a click/pop eliminator in CE/AA that I've used to archive some of my vinyl. Go easy with this though, and don't use the presets. If there are tons of clicks you're better off not trying to remove all of them, because it will likely take some audio with it.

Good luck and please post your final results!

Rick,

Could you post a snippet of just noise from this recording? I tried to map a noise profile to your clip but I need a noise reference. The piano sounded good, but the voice was wrecked. I suspect that the time stretching might have had a lot to do with it, but it's hard to tell without having a noise reference. There's so much noise in this that you're probably going to have to deal with some noise. It's not all bad though, the noise may help keep the recording in its historical perspective.

Your grandmother is quite a talented lady...

Thanks everybody for the comments.

Years ago when I had a record player that had a 78 speed setting, I played this record and made a reel-to-reel tape of it for archiving purposes. That reel-to-reel is virtually unplayable today because of improper storage but I have heard it enough so that the sound sticks in my memory.

When I did the pitch/time shift in SONAR I was absolutely amazed at how well it worked despite the extreme settings. I thought that the noise problem was much worse than any artifacts that would affect the voice and piano so that is why I decided that this method of recording was sufficient. However, just the fact that everyone says find a 78 RPM turntable first is enough to convince me that is what I must do.

In the meantime, I'm still looking for restoration techniques that will work with what I have now and with a new recording once I find a 78 RPM machine.

The record has held up quite well for 62 years. My understanding is that it was made on a home recording machine that cut audio tracks into blank shellac disks. It was, in fact, probably the 1942 equivalent of SONAR.

ORIGINAL: Boogie
Could you post a snippet of just noise from this recording?

Here are clips of just the noise. The first one is about one second long from just after the lead-in groove to just before the piano hits its first note. Is that enough to work with?

http://216.194.91.30/song/noise.wav

This clip is from the end, just after the music stops, to just before the lead-out groove. There is some additional strange noise here but it's all I have without re-recording the song.

http://216.194.91.30/song/noise_end.wav

Also, thanks for noting that Pyro contains some basic noise reduction tools. I've tried it out and it seems to offer some hope. If SoundForge does a better job I will probably be looking into that also.

This is a really cool project. I'm looking forward to getting a first-rate digital remaster.

I made another attempt using the noise clips you posted. The noise clips themselves, especially the noise_end.wav, sound like they have suffered from artifacts due to the time stretch. Ohhey's probably right about the turntable you're using. A lo-fi 78 RPM machine will likely pick up less of the noise and you won't have the time stretching artifacts. Let us know if you'd like more help. (I must admit that I'm no expert.) I'm quite interested in hearing the final result so keep us posted.

You might try popping over to http://www.audiomastersforum.org/amforum/index.php where a lot of the Cool Edit Pro 'old timers' hang and see which ones you could ask about this - like Andrew Rose (UK) to name drop one of the Pros.

I guess you could even get a pro to do the transfer if it's only that one cut so you don't have to worry about buying a 78 turntables, etc.

As far as the old reel-to-reel tape goes maybe you could 'bake' it and bring it back to life long enough to get your earlier transcription from it.