Trying to Clean Up Some Ancient Audio Files
I was looking at trying to clean up a few digital recordings I'd made back on my old NeXTSTEP turbo Color Slab, which is now gone to the great computer room in the sky, as there was a lot of noise in the samples and it seemed like a simple thing to do - filter it, baby. High-pass filter to be more precise. So I started looking around to see what I had to work with.
Unfortunately, when I sent an email to the Fission creators, it was clear that Fission was going to be a time-slice editing tool - lossless editing in their marketing terms, and I can certainly respect that. It's far more likely in this day and age to have access to a good digital master than the crummy digital master I have now. But be that as it may, it was clear after emailing them that I wasn't going to be able to use Fission for this - I had to look elsewhere.
The next thing I saw was Audacity 1.3.7, a free audio editor. It looked like it had decent capabilities, including a lot of plugins that got installed into the system at /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ so that they might be used by many different audio editing applications. While I liked the capabilities of Audacity, it just wasn't getting done what I needed. However, it did point out to me that these plugins might be useful by other apps, and that was very helpful.
The next thing I found was something I'd hit on before - Wave Editor 1.4.4. This was a very nicely done audio editor, and while it was $79, I'm not against paying for a good tool when I see it. What I was able to see when I started playing with it, in depth, was that it had the tools to filter out the noise pretty effectively. I was still a little concerned that it suppressed the volume as much as it did when I applied the HPF, but that's probably something I can deal with in the app as well.
It had the nice tools like a spectrum analyzer and lots of ways of looking at the data - very much as I might have written it - from a math and engineering standpoint. Pretty nice. I also like that they have a complete support system built right into the app so I can ask a question if I get stuck on something. Pretty nice for a tool like this that there's a steep learning curve on.
So I'm going to see if I can't fix up these old files and clean out the noise. Sure do hope so.