Poor quality recording

[oldwell]

I have a cassette tape on which I recorded a family history interview with my late father.  However, the quality of the recording is very poor, making it impossible to pick out much of what he says.  Does anyone know if there is some way of getting the sound enhanced.

Peter

[tomkin]

 Hi Peter,

              The first thing that I would do is to copy the cassette onto another

     one (high quality)  Then put the original in a safe place so that it cannot

      be damaged. Any work is then done on the copy so that if you do something wrong

        then it is to the copy and not the precious original.

       Have a look at this free download. It is very highly regarded but I also suspect that

       you may well have a lot of learning to do.  Of course you will have to copy the tape

        onto an audio CD or DVD that your computer will accept so that you can experiment.

        ( when I converted all my old cassettes to CD Roms, I used an old Walkman type

        player connected to my computer by a cable and used a Creative software program.

         It was a bit complicated but they all work perfectly.)

              http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/features

            I do hope that somebody comes on here and gives you a far better and simpler

               method. ( Maybe your Hi/Fi system will let you copy the tape direct to CD.)

                 Then you could experiment with the CD in your computer with the above

                 programme.

           Good Luck,
                                  Tomkin

[downside]

There is some free audio editing software available, like here for instance:-

http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/

Once you have created a sound file on your hard drive you can use the software above to enhance it and create a second enhanced file which you can burn to a CD.

The main thing is to copy your audio data from your cassette to your hard drive.  You may need to purchase an audio lead to connect your cassette palyer to the sound card at the back of your PC.  I used Polderbits to copy the audio from the cassette deck to the computer:-

http://www.polderbits.com/index.html

You may be able to enhance the sound just using Polderbits therefore you will only have to create one audio file on your PC.

[LBobble]

Can recommend Goldwave. A bit complicated to use but very good.
This program was actually used to clean up Neil Armstrong's first message from the moon landing. Found the missing "and" which made sense of the message.
http://www.goldwave.com/
Free download.

Bob

[Scottiedog]

Not wishing to complicate this any further for you, but I thought I should add the benefit of my experience.

I tried doing this just by connecting a tape deck to my pc at line level. I found the pc signal was too high and I was getting distortion. I used the software input level control to correct for this. However, I soon realised that this was simply "clipping" the signal rather then effecting an overall reduction.

So .... to get the best results (and that's what you're going to need in your situation) you may need to look at attenuating the output of your tape deck somehow. I used a couple of variable resistors I had kicking about.

[oldwell]

Many thanks to all those who responded.  There are obviously several avenues to explore.  I will post another response if I have any success to report.

Peter