Best way to remove noise from old cassette tape.

R

ruwty5hi

New Member
I am trying to restore some old cassette tapes of classical guitar. I have tried several plugins made for this purpose and although they seem to work I’m left with phasing artifacts in the audio. I would like to find a way to solve this and hope someone in this group has some ideas.
Thanks, Rusty
 
Is there a constant noise and if so is there any section where you just have that noise and no music signal, eg at the beginning, end of between tracks?

It’s an old trick but what might do something is to record that section of noise, loop it and play on another track, reverse the phase (using gain plugin I think) and mix it together so there may be some cancellation.

Otoh do the cassette labels give any clue about what if any noise reduction was used when they were recorded?
 
Just a thought that might be easier. If it's constant and consistent noise and you have a section with just the noise and loop it, why not analyse the frequency range where it sits (it should be a fairly narrow range) and see if you can realistically pull it down across the whole track without losing too much of what you want to keep. You'll probably need to compromise a little and still retain some of the noise but you can always automate the volume where there is just noise and dip it being careful not to make the attack and release too sharp.
 
There are a lot of noise reduction apps and plugins that can be used to clean up cassette tracks. My recollection is that most if not all of them require a section that only has the noise. A search will give you a lot of possibilities for noise reduction plugins will find a lot of possibilities. It is likely that some work better than others on any specific cassette recording.
 
Back
Top