distoerted vocals--any way to fix?

Question

Level 1

20 points

distoerted vocals--any way to fix?

I have to work with a recording, a spoken voice thing, where the signal was much too hot and the vocals were pretty badly overdriven. There's no way to fix that--the event is over. I know you can't get rid of the distortion, but is there any way to minimize it? Any settings/tools that can lessen the impact of distortion? it's mostly solo male voices; they were recorded through a wireless mic into a marantz pmd 660.

Any ideas?

Thnk

macbook pro, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Dec 10, 2007 2:22 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 10, 2007 4:11 PM in response to momalle3

if you have NO WAY of re-recording it then my advice would be to distort the whole vocal track.. Use some bit crushing and sample rate reduction..

That way at least it sounds intentional.

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Answer 2

Dec 10, 2007 4:26 PM in response to momalle3

Interestingly enough, Izotope RX has a tool (Declipper) that supposedly does what you want. It might be a little bit on the costly side, though.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/

Listen to the "Female Vocal Clipped/Declipped" sample. They have a demo so you can see if it works on your audio.

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Answer 3

momalle3 Author

Level 1

20 points

Dec 10, 2007 6:00 PM in response to Andrew Tokuda

That's a nice idea--I'm a big fan of OzoneIII and I've used some of their other stuff--we could use that at work

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Answer 4

blayzay

Level 3

630 points

Dec 10, 2007 10:50 PM in response to Andrew Tokuda

Wow!

That is incredible piece of Software Andrew Tokuda, thanks for the link,

Fr.BlayZay.

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Answer 5

Dec 11, 2007 6:55 AM in response to momalle3

I've restored a lot of bad dialog with this problem. Quite a few from the notorious PMD660, btw!

Apps like Rx, Soundsoap Pro, along with a long list of other apps like this, (some good, some bad) can be useful but if it's really badly distorted it can help a lot to do a bit of spot declicking first. The Clicks and Pops analysis function in Soundtrack Pro is as good as any of them and since you already have it, giving it a go wouldn't hurt. Select very bad short areas to work with and play with the threshold settings, etc., to see if you can eliminate the worst of it first.

Even when you get an app like Rx, it can often help to bounce the dialog file into 3 files which split the audio into 3 freq bands. (Use the Linear EQ for this if you don't have something better.) Try to restore each one, then mix them back together. There's a bunch of other tricks with dynamics processors that can be utilized, but it really depends on how bad it really is.

Good luck!

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Answer 6

Dec 11, 2007 9:22 AM in response to Randall Thomas

Randall Thomas wrote:
...Quite a few from the notorious PMD660, btw!

Sorry to go off the subject of this thread, but what's the issue (are the issues?) of the PMD660? I was considering getting one of the Marantz boxes recently.

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