Ableton Forum

Here’s a conundrum. I recently got the ol 4 track repaired, and trying to transfer as well as utilize some of these ancient recordings. While charming fer a sec (as you know some folks seek out these previous annoyances). I really want to get the best of my late friends acoustic guitar by bringing it and adding to on the digital realm. I am on an iMac, have Ableton suite, Neutron and Ozone standard which so far has only resulting in pronunciation of the hiss. Im about to play w gating and eq. Any suggestion wo blowing 1500 on more software?

With a spectrum analyzer and some notch EQ you should be able to notch it out but personally I use z-noise plugin by waves which can analyse a noise section of tape and magically filter that profiled noise out the recording. Works a treat but is just the quick lazy way of doing noise reduction.

I highly recommend Izotope RX7 if you can afford it which can remove hiss with barely any damage to the audio as a whole. If you have tape flutter or other artifacts, Celemony's extremely expensive Capstan can work wonders. It's so expensive, you can rent it for a couple of days.

Audacity can do some amazing stuff, but it's not as dead easy.

ISSE (free):
http://isse.sourceforge.net/index.html

Photosounder
https://photosounder.com/

Maybe Factorsynth:
https://www.jjburred.com/software/factorsynth/

With ISSE/Photosounder you can basically select the "good" sounds with a photoshop-like brush mask tool and delete the undesirable parts.

Not sure, but from my memory, ISSE is "smart" and can auto-select based on stuff you already selected saving time.

Photosounder has a nice harmonics "brush", that selects all harmonics above a selection you make, also saving time.

Though it is not really made for cleaning audio, with Factorsynth you can split the sound into several "components", and then select only the good ones.

Audacity is definitely worth trying. Adobe Audition can do some impressive things with noise sometimes, but like all Adobe’s stuff these days it has a rental charge. You can get a free demo, but I’m not sure what, if anything, is disabled in it.

Thanks all. Will download and try isse tonight. If thair are still issues I’ll give the other methods a go.