Recorded too loud sound... :(

[coprex]

hi there,

I'm not a digest in audio recording, so I unexpetly recorded
some sounds but the microphone resulted too sensible, or the
sounds too loud, or both.
Now I want to know if there is some way to clean up a little
this sound, or brighten it.

Thanks for your patience

[AndyH]

You have not made the problem very clear, but the most likely result is that you have over driven something in the signal chain. If this occurred in the analogue domain, the signal was badly distorted or clipped. If you recorded to a digital format, the input to the ADC was too high and the signal was clipped. In neither case are you likely to be able to recover much.

If the audio is clipped because of over loading the ADC input, and that wasn't too extreme, some repair is possible. Many audio editors have clip repair tools. You must, I believe, tackle each clipped peak individually. It isn't possible to get to where a proper recording would have been but you may be able to improve the sound.

The other possibility I can think of is that there is a mixture of audio sources in your recording and some are too loud relative to the other(s). If all are on the same track, the only possibility I know about is to try to select each too loud section individually and apply reducing volume envelopes or de-amplification. The audio must be in digital form to be used in a computer audio editor.

[guanche]

To work with audio it has to be good and clean from the beginig. IMO the best thing you can do is recording your source again, if it´s possible.
Anyway andy is right! you can try editing peak by peak or with some kind of sound cleaner, but this should be only if you cannot record again.
It´s always better to have everything under control from the beginig. The result will be better.

[coprex]

yes, you've got what the problem is...sorry if I explained it so badly...
the microphone was like flooded by sounds too loud.
I've done as you both suggested, trying to reduce volume and/or repair portions of the recording.
I've used Audacity 1.3.2 and it seemed that its "repair" tool was the better provided to solve the problem but.....I can repair just fractions of second at time! :( it's going to take hours of boring work to apply it to the entire track, 0.05 seconds per time...isn't there a faster way?

thanks for your patience

[guanche]

I don´t know!

Anyway don´t forget that "rule": fix everything from the begining.

Good luck!!

[AndyH]

Audacity's tools are pretty primitive but you have to pay for better software like Adobe Audition. Unfortunately not many people want to play with badly recorded stuff, the orientation is always to record properly to begin with. Therefore there has not been, to my knowledge, much effort to develop tools to simplify a recovery process that so few want to ever try.

Audacity and Audition are examples of audio editors for "normal" audio recordings. Audition is a lot more sophisticated and has many more tools, but its orientation is similar to Audacity's. There are, however, other kinds of editors for "forensic" audio clean-up, where the main effort is to recover information, not necessarily to make it sound good. I know little about these programs, but my impression is that they cost thousands of dollars.

I still don't understand exactly what your difficulty is. If you have one part that would be alright if it were by itself but there is some additional sound in the recording that you don't want, noise reduction might be helpful. Noise reduction can work very well some times, but mostly when the noise is less loud than the audio you want to improve.

If, however, your problem is that everything was recorded too loudly and is thus distorted and clipped, noise reduction is not an answer. You might try selecting a few characteristics seconds of one channel to a new file, then convert that to a reasonably high quality mp3 to post. Then people could listen to the problem and at least understand what you are facing. Then we could then say whether or not we know of any better solution.

[MrHope]

y
I've used Audacity 1.3.2 and it seemed that its "repair" tool was the better provided to solve the problem but.....I can repair just fractions of second at time! :( it's going to take hours of boring work to apply it to the entire track, 0.05 seconds per time...isn't there a faster way?

No, there is not a faster way to do it.

That's the reason why clipping is hated so much by engineers. The best solution is to re-record the audio at a lower level without clipping. This is also one reason why people record through compressors or peak limiters--to prevent clipping.