Wow, thanks, John! That’s very nice of you.
Fenris, I’ll be home about 7:30 ET. I’ll come back on then and we can synchronize our settings in Audition, OK?
It’s weird, they don’t have a preset for those filters in FFT Filter, at least on the current version. I have it at home on version 1. I’ll find out how you can get it when I get there.
I’d move and second John’s nomination! You do, in fact, rock Fishbicycle!
I’m don’t know if I’ll be around this evening, but if you start listing your settings, I can always catch up later!! 
And thank you again for all the advice: I can’t tell you what a difference those cleaning tips have made!
I must have missed this thread back when it was started, but I would like to compliment Fishbicycle as well. Very informative.
I was especially interested that you took the time to tune recordings to A=440, something which has always been important and bothered me as how off commercial recordings can be. But when I do this, I try to do it at the analog end, like altering the turntable or capstan speed before digitizing. The nature of digitizing, then modifying the speed by, say, .5%, and resampling, should introduce an artifact in the same manner as a straight line tilted oh-so-slightly from the horizontal comes out jagged in a digital photo when enlarged. Do you just ignore this or somehow compensate for it?
And one more question. I have a stack of 78’s I would like to digitize, in varying condition from poor to pretty good. The oldest especially have a very low signal-to-noise ratio and the noise is typically the frying hiss kind, which soft musical passages disappear into. I have had very little success removing it. A gate is out of the question. Any suggestions? (They would have to be generic fixes, as I don’t have the high-class software you do.)
Sure wish these techniques worked for tape. I’ve got a box full of 80’s stuff that is rather esoteric. Unfortunately, I end up with fairly high fidelity reproductions of wow and flutter. :smack: Further, the tapes I’d like to recover the most are the ones I listened to the most, so they suffer the most degradation.
My brother used to use wd-40 on his records, when he dubbed them to a hard drive. 
Thanks, everyone, for the kind comments. It’s nice to be able to teach somebody to do something useful. I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, but this is one area where I know a thing or two.
Fenris, do you have an IM program? I have MSN Messenger. I think it would be a lot easier to do your setup if we could converse in real time. It’s not so complicated a task to set up Audition, but I can’t think of a way around a lot of clarification posts if we do it on the board. With IM, it’d take a few minutes. You can e-mail me if you like.
Musicat, I have never encountered a sonic artifact of pitch resampling with Cool Edit or Audition. They have three modes, Low, Medium and High Precision. I don’t know what the other two are for, they sound like crap. High Precision does the digital equivalent of speeding up or slowing down without any residual noise of any kind. Just now, I finished pitching up a 45:00 Hendrix concert to A=440. Sounds exactly like it did before, only at the right speed.
As for your 78s, my first question would be: do you have a 3-mil 78-RPM stylus? This is a must-have, as an LP stylus is much too small to play a 78. It will rest on the bottom of the groove and pick up all the grunge and noise, rather than the music, which is on the sides of the groove walls. I have a favorite 78 from childhood that I never heard without the wall of noise until I played it with a proper 78 stylus- last year. The resulting remaster sounds as good as any CD issue of a 78 taken from a good-condition disc. No “wssshhhh, wsssshhhh” in the background. The upright bass on my mint 78 of Dean Martin’s “Memories Are Made Of This” vibrated a clock off of my wall. You can’t get results like that with an LP stylus on a 78. So that would be my first line of defense. After you get a proper recording, then you’ll have a better idea of what noise you need to remove. Generic fixes? Gee, I dunno. EQ is out. I don’t know what to tell you, since I don’t know what software you are using for it.
Unintentionally Blank, tape restoration is a whole other animal. Wow and flutter sucks. There’s nothing you can do for it. And for tapes that have been played hundreds of times, passing over heads that have never been demagnetized, a great deal of the original signal is permanently gone - having been erased a little every time it was played.
ouryL: On behalf of record and turntable owners everywhere, let me just say, :eek: :eek: :eek: !!!
Oh my god. This thread is wonderful.
I think you’ve even helped with another question I’ve had, fishbicycle—I’m trying to remember despite laziness as to searching. It was something music-related.
But, goodness-gracious—I think I’ll give this a shot! Since I don’t have Cool Edit, I’ll give it a shot with Audacity—perhaps even using Fenris’s tips if the other methods are beyond my resources.
I’ve only skimmed the thread—it will take me a while to thoroughly understand. But, after I do—wow! it will be fun.
Thanks.
Fishbicycle, I have a new 78-sized stylus ready to install in a cart, which I will do before getting serious on this. I do know the difference between 45/45 and bottom recordings, so I understand what you are saying. Hey - could we use the microgroove stylus to pick up the bottom groove from the old Edisons?! I have some of those around someplace.
I tried processing some old 45s and wasn’t too successful at removing the frying-hiss. I am using Goldwave, which has served me well for everything else.
Thanks and look for an e-mail! 
Hey Fishbicycle–I found a tweak to your technique (that you probably already know, dammit! 
) that really reduces that low-level crackle that’s so damned hard to get out from damaged vinyl.
All you do is this: immediately after running the filters to get rid of AC line noise and hum, run an amplify. Choose “center wave” and then “Calculate” down at the bottom–run it and THEN continue on to the Younglove method. It appears that amplifying things first makes the crackle “loud” enough to be removed by Younglove and, if necessary (it was on a couple of tracks) a quick polish with a very, very lightly applied de-hisser.
I’ve only tried it on one album so I don’t know for sure that this technique works on everything, but it really made a difference on one album.
Yes, I knew about that. I always center the wave and amlify to 96, unless it would alter the stereo balance to do so.
I’ve only encountered a couple of kinds of vinyl noise that are resistant to declicking. You can clean almost anything up with some effort and experimentation.
Please excuse the thread necro, first time poster here
Wow, this thread is old, but there are a lot of good pieces of advice here for cleaning up vinyl transfers. I wonder how much of it is still relevant today?
I’ve just gotten into doing some serious needle drops and am intrigued to try out fishbicycle’s method. Are users here still following these steps, or have things changed with the introduction of new software?
Couple things. I too have done a fair bit of restoration and wholly recommend iZotope RX Advanced for its wonderful restoration toolkit.
I think the high pass at 40hz is too high - there is muck there, but a lot of low-level love lives there in the trenches too, even on vinyl. I usually back it off at 20hz instead, and use a frequency-limited noise profile of any residual thumps/groans to reduce any remaining rumble.
An old trick that is surprisingly effective and less destructive is to mid/side encode the audio before any declicking. Headphones will show that your generic crackle and clicks/pops are not equally present in both channels; they are usually discrete in either the left or right channel with your loud POPs typically being in the center. When you run a M/S encode on the audio, your centered audio from the original signal will be in the left resulting channel, and the combined hard-panned L and R will now be in the right channel. The new R channel will usually be a third or less of the volume of the new L channel too, with the noise being far more prominent. Run your declick/decrackle processes on the R channel first, and you (usually) can afford to be a bit more aggressive with your settings here. Then run it on the L channel, to knock down those originally-centered pops, dialing back the aggressiveness as needed. Then, put the audio back together in its original stereo spread by running a mid/side decode on it. Then, do whatever noise reduction scheme you choose, smooth up tops/tails, and Bob’s yer uncle.
What’s a mid/side encode/decode?
Yow! This got super technical of a sudden! I just use an Ion turntable and the (free) Audacity software. Their “click removal” (in a small enough font that looks like “dick removal”) feature works pretty darn well.
I’m one of those guys for whom “high end audio” means “anything with more signal than noise.”
One other technique that is well-respected for rescuing deeply dirty records is the wood glue method - literally coating the entire grooved surface with wood glue, waiting for it to dry, then peeling it off.
Mid/Side is a microphone technique that is valued for it’s ability to alter the “width” of the stereo image after the fact. Rather than a pair of standard microphones - most of the ones you’ll see used are cardioid, and pick up mainly from the front - the mid/side technique uses one cardioid aimed at the stage, and one “figure 8” type microphone that picks up equally well from the front and back. It is mounted perpendicular to the first microphone to pick up from the sides. If you record in this way, you have to “decode” the mid/side pair into a stereo pair, inverting the phase of the sounds picked up from the rear of the figure-8 microphone. And as you do so, you can control the ratio of the sound from the sides to the middle in the resulting stereo track.
I don’t care how well it works, I’m not clicking on it!
Bob…bob…bob…Bobbit-Ann…