I am a newbie here, and to pc audio. My question is, I have some old recordings from the '50's and '60's, they are speaches with and without audiences. As I am sure you can assume the quality sucks. Lots of noise, hissing, popping, on and on.... what I am seeking are suggestions on what I could do to clean them up. I have CoolEdit Pro, But I am lost, I've tried some of the filters, with out allot of success, (I just used the filters as is, I did not adjust anything in the filters, because I don't know what I should be trying to correct.) I'm not stupid just inexperienced. LOL. I have a freind that has access to Other Audio Editing software, but he is clueless as well. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
TIA Mike

Ps. I tried the noise reduction filter, and after it ran there was nothing left. LOL

Hi! There's no magic wand solution to your problem and perfection doesn't exist, even if you were to manually try and eliminate every single pop, crack and hiss sound. My advice: save yourself the hassle and keep your recordings in their original state.

There's many more programs like Pinnacle/Steinberg's Clean (no longer), Magix' Cleaning Lab, WavePurity etc., but as your experience with CoolEdit/Audition shows, you can either forget them or prepare yourself for a Sysiphus work.

You can try the hydrogenaudio forums for more expert advice.

I've only tried this with a couple of different programs and don't even remember what they were called but they did clean up the pops and clicks a little bit but they sounded worse than before, no tone quality at all.

Sound Forge by Sonic Foundry is a excellent program ... not easy to master and not cheap either .. all depends how valuable your recordings are to you but does a great job ...

Wobble , seems i've seen that avatar someplace else , am i correct ??

I posted a larger one on the "little context thead" or somewhere a few months ago.

The reason i said that is my wife is mega into cat's , she totally freaked when i showed her your avatar and seemed to think she seen it somewhere else ... should hook her up with Arachne ( balls of fur ) , anyways , don't want to hijack this thread ..

Hi hearmi,

Welcome to the forums!


This is not that difficult a job to do, but it can be time consuming, esp. if you are trying to get "perfection". I have cleaned up many an old time radio show, etc., with audio editing programs...

Cool edit should do the job for you. I haven't used that pgm. in awhile, I mainly use Goldwave now. The filters work great for reducing pops & clicks. If there is a lot of audience noise, such as laughter, clapping, etc., I would caution against trying to reduce that very much. The compression filters/noise gates are sometimes used for that, but you can end up with an odd sounding file that is annoying, where the software is trying to "clip" or reduce the clapping/off mike talking, etc.

Also, after applying the filter, you can play/preview some of the file; if you don't like the sound of it, click the "undo" option & re-apply another filter. After you get it set like you want it for one file, you may be able to "batch process" all of them at the same time, applying the corrections to all files at once, if they are all similar.

I have fould the help files in godwave to be useful for me, when I first started out.
Don't let your inexperience stop you; play around with the settings & have fun!

cheers, katzz

P.S. - Keep us posted on your progress!