music - Audio splitting and noise removal on Windows

07
2014-07
  • pts

    My mother has about 100 hours of audio in a mix of MP3 and WAV files, the digitized versions of her vinyl records. Each file contains about 5 songs with a few seconds of (noisy) pause between them. My mother needs software for Windows XP with which she can listen to the files, find the gaps manually, split the files at the gaps found, reduce noise on each song, and export the songs to individual MP3 files.

    My mother has very limited software user skills and affinity, and she doesn't speak English. The simpler the software, the better for her, even if noise reduction is worse than with a more sophisticated, but more complicated software. I'd prefer free software, freeware or shareware (which can do all above). Please recommend something much simpler than Audacity. The software should guide the user through the process, always showing the next few available steps, and being intuitive in the sense that there are only a few allowed actions and it's obvious what they are and how to activate them.

    Which software would you recommend?

    • Answers
  • Kanini

    Check out Audacity. It is free. In fact, check out the answer to my previous question which details in clear steps as to how to do the splitting here.

    It is simple. It is fun.

  • Eric White

    She should be able to do this using Audacity.

    It can run under many languages thanks to community translation efforts.

    And it's pretty good at letting you manually mark up large audio files and split them up into smaller individual files: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=files&i=split

    I've done this a few times and it Just Worked.

  • RedGrittyBrick

    Try Audacity

  • pts

    It turns out that there is no easy-to-use software for that, at least nothing simpler than Audacity.

  • bastibe

    Many CD burning software includes some vinyl digitizing software including gap detection and click removal. This software is usually pretty good and easy to use. Technically, it usually includes algorithms to remove clicks, popping and low frequency humming.

    For example, you can get such a software as part of Nero Burning ROM or Roxio CD Spin Doctor

    If you try to do the same thing manually, a few notes:

    • Noise removal is technically impossible and every algorithm out there will result in worse sound quality than the noisy original. (There is no way for an algorithm to figure out which part of the sound is music and which is noise. There are a few algorithms which can improve speech quality, but music quality always suffers. I work in this field and know this for certain)

    • However, click removal is totally possible and very helpful for vinyl recordings and will get rid of the most noticeable clicks and pops.

    • Vinyl recordings usually include some low-frequency humming due to the vinyl disk being uneven. You can get rid of that either with a low-pass filter or (better) a hum removal algorithm. The results are usually very satisfactory.

    • Background noise is most audible in gaps in the music. You can get rid of this noise by using a noise gate. A noise gate does not actually remove any noise, but it reduces the overall gain when there is no audio playing. This effectively turns off the audio in gaps, which makes background noise less noticeable.


    • Related Question

    windows - Does this exist: software for noise cancellation
  • Alterlife

    I'm aware that the best option for noise cancelling is to buy myself a pair of noise cancelling headphones...

    But is there any software available that would use the pc mic and headphones to block background noise?


    • Related Answers
  • bastibe

    There are basically two methods for noise suppression

    1. Noise suppression using Wiener-filters. Experience shows that these sound awful even though they are mathematically "optimal". If you can get some information about the actual noise and if the noise is stationary and uncorrelated and if you pour in some additional brainpower, audio quality can be improved upon. But still, this is not a practical solution for most circumstances. (Won't work offline and uses far too much processing power...)
    2. Playback of latency-corrected, phase-inverted background noise together with the usable signal. This works rather well for headphones, although it does usually introduce some smearing in the basses. However, this, too, does not work offline as it needs the actual background noise signal from the surroundings. And it is not very usable for PCs since they introduce too much audio latency. You could try this with some minimal realtime-Linux-kernel, though.

    Based on my experiences with audio processing and various noise cancellation techniques, I would recommend some good sound-insulated headphones. Typically, these will result in better sound without the necessity of any signal processing tricks that won't work too well anyway.

  • Idiomatic

    Not possible for physical/hardware reasons.

    Noise canceling headphones work by recording sound and playing a phase inverted sound to cancel it. With a laptop the mic is first off shitty, and nicely in front of you this means sound coming from behind you will reach your ears first before it even hits the mic. Then it has to go through the computer onto the slow soundcard (likely a ping of .1seconds or more) to the speakers where it'll play. This lag time will be too great to deal with.

    So it comes down to mainly this:
    You and the mic hear different things (in headphones they are in your ears).
    Lag time from standard laptop soundcards is big, you often can't even get a guitar amp working well for this reason over your computer (near 0 in the headphones).

    This would, no matter how optimized result in a horrible experience.

  • harrymc

    See this article : Noise Cancelling in Software?.

    It's interesting, but has no solution.

  • Matthew Lock

    It's not actually noise cancelling but Chatterblocker can help you mask/ignore external sounds.

  • Dave York

    Using MATLAB and this guide / sample code:

    http://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/examples/acoustic-noise-cancellation-lms-.html

    you could record the noise you are trying to cancel (to a wav) and build an audio output that would cancel it. You might also be able to modify the code to take the mic input as the noise and have it adaptively generate the output and play it out.

    Keep in mind noise cancellation works best with low frequency "mechanical" type noises. High pitch (high frequency) noises are much more difficult to cancel.

  • user281793

    If the sound you need to cancel is consistent, for example inside an airplane or the hum of a factory, it seems like the computer's lag shouldn't matter, because the sound is the same no matter how late it arrives. The key would be to accurately phase shift the resulting sound in your headphones. For example, one might try adjustable phase shifting software such as on http://freemusicsoftware.org/category/free-vst-effects-2/phase-shifter

    You could even record the background noise and then replay it. You would have to adjust the phase until it was the opposite of what your ears hear directly.

    If the poor laptop mic was an issue, you could bring along a used SM58 with you cheaply enough.

    Any feedback on this idea?