Effectively cleaning up analog hiss from digital audio?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been capturing a lot of VHS tapes to my computer lately. Most of them have been in good condition, and, aside from normalization, I haven’t had to edit the WAV files before encoding to MP2. Actually, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the audio quality I’ve been able to achieve from most of them. I do, however, have a few tapes that suffer from analog hiss bad enough that it makes viewing them unpleasant - at least to me. But then, I’ve always been picky about that kind of thing.

To give you an idea of what the hiss sounds like and how bad it is, I’ve posted a short excerpt here (444 KB). I don’t know if there are any media players that can handle MP3 but not MP2, but, just in case there are, I’ve re-encoded the clip to MP3. The noise is still clearly audible.

I have my sound card going out to my receiver, which has Digital NR. When I play it like this, I can’t make out any hiss at all. Still, I’d like the audio on my VCD to sound good in the first place, rather than having to rely on an external device take care of it. Is there a decent software solution to this?

A while back when I had this problem, I tried a couple of different programs that claimed to do what I needed. Both of them made me specify a section of the song where the hiss was most evident - and then proceeded to bungle the results. One program didn’t seem to do anything at all. The other spit out a file that had no music, but only a high-pitched, piercing sound that made my ears feel like they were going to bleed.

So, digital audio Dopers: is there a good solution here? I’d prefer freeware, but am willing to pay for something if it does a better job.

2

Download and install Audacity - it is a full-featured audio editing program, but one of the features is a noise filter; you’d use it like this:
Import your audio track
Select a bit of silence (i.e. a part that consists of noise only) and tell the noise reduction filter that this is noise
Select the whole track and apply the noise filter.
Export the audio.

3

Audacity

4

See, that’s the problem. It’s a VHS of a concert. There is literally not one second of the audio without the audience cheering or music playing - even during the credits.

How is my receiver able to do perfectly exactly what I want without having to pick out pieces of silence manually?

5

I think that ordinary noise-reduction solutions do this by assuming that noise will sound a certain way- in most cases they are right - the noise will be some kind of periodic hum or relatively high-pitched hiss, but if your video was about snakes(hisssss) that live in power stations(hummmmm), you might well find that a traditional noise filter would spoil it.

Is there not a moment of near-silence between notes or lyrics somewhere?

6

I’ll look over the video later tonight (I should have gone to sleep hours ago) for a section like that, but I’m kind of doubtful. See, the concert was attended by some 300,000 people. They make quite a racket.

Optimally, I’d like to find a software tool that does exactly what my receiver does to the audio, quickly, easily, and with little room for error. I’m wondering if such a thing exists.

7

Why not pipe the music out from your sound card through the digital NR and then back into the audio in and re-record it?