[DeadlyOats]

I'm going to be recording music from my audio cassettes into my computer. I know that the music quality is going to be yucky. I want to reduce the noise from the recordings before converting the WAV files to Ogg Vorbis.

I'm going to use Audacity to record the music from my cassette player to my PC. Does Audacity also have features to clean up the sound, or do I need a different app for that?

If Audacity can clean up the noise, but there are better apps for that operation, what are they?

Thanks.

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by DeadlyOats

I'm going to be recording music from my audio cassettes into my computer. I know that the music quality is going to be yucky. I want to reduce the noise from the recordings before converting the WAV files to Ogg Vorbis.

I'm going to use Audacity to record the music from my cassette player to my PC. Does Audacity also have features to clean up the sound, or do I need a different app for that?

If Audacity can clean up the noise, but there are better apps for that operation, what are they?

Thanks.

Alsa support the ladspa plugins. You might need to install them separately depending on your distro. Between those plugins, you can find plenty of effects, amongst them, sound reduction and many more stuff that you might find useful when recording from tapes. Normalizers and compressors (I am not sure if these names are correct for those effects in english, sorry) are useful when doing this kind of tasks.

However, there are things that are more important. First, adjust your source to a moderate level to avoid distortion. Make sure you make a check and monitor the output levels on a loud part to set the output level, as shown in the 4th part of the "Setting up Audacity" part in this document.

Transferring tapes and records to computer or CD - Audacity Wiki

If you don't set that level high enough, the signal will be weak, if you surpase a given level, then the sound will saturate on the louder part, and you will get a lot of noise.

Make also sure you use the line input and not the microphone input, I suppose you already know most of this, but just in case :P

[DeadlyOats]

Thanks for the advice. And thank you, so much, for the link. That's exactly what I needed!

I installed:

alsa-plugins-jack
alsa-plugins-pulse
alsa-plugins-samplerate

I did not install alsa-plugins-maemo because I don't have a Nokia 770 whatever that is. Is that O.K., or should I install it anyway?

ladspa, and alsa-plugins were already installed.

Do I need anything else?

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by DeadlyOats

Do I need anything else?

I don't think so. Just play around with the ladspa plugins. They are all somewhere under the audacity menus. Make some tests and decide what settings work better for you.

If you decide to use noise reduction, make sure that you test it with some different pieces, just to make sure that you are not losing anything important. Sometimes, noise reductions and noise doors can cut more than they should.