Hi,

I am hoping to find advice here from those who know about technological things of which I have no clue.

You see, my dad died a couple months ago, and while digging through my old cassete tapes recently, I found a treasure. It was a cassete tape with about ten minutes of my dad's voice as he was having fun at a family gathering. It was recorded about 1974, with my small portable cassette recorder. To my knowledge, this is the only existing recording of my dad's voice!

Naturally, it is destined to become an heirloom, but there is a problem which I don't know how to solve: to wit, tthe tape sufers from a lot of background noise...mainly tape hiss, and the annoying "whir" of the motor in the cassette player. Mostly the latter.

Anyway, I am quite cognizant of the fact that it is INDEED technologically possible to eliminate that extraneous noise, leaving only the voices, and bringing them out in a very clear fashion. I am sure the FBI and other such organazations have the technology to do this.

But I am NOT about to call the FBI!

What I want to do is to have this process done,and then make several copies to give to various family members as gifts.

Can anybody here tell me how I can get this done, and of course at a reasonable fee?

If anyone can help, this would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks,

Doug

Soundforge Noise Reduction module

Doug,

I would call your local radio/TV station and talk to the technical people. They may know of somebody locally (or do it themselves on the side). They will know who will be competant, hopefully.

If you care to do it yourself, I googled for a bit and came up with this site:

Cassette Tape Restoration

AT least this will give you a bit of background. Good luck and let me know how it goes. I have 60 reals of old super 8 film I have to recover and put on DVD, made by my wife's parents...from the 40's and 50's. This is equally challenging for me.

That's an interesting link. Baking cassette tapes?? "Hey mom. What's for dinner?" Man, what will they think of next!

Thanks Steven for the link, I am finding it most useful.
Doug, I have some excellent software for just that kind of job. If you would like to make a copy of the original and send it to me, I will do it for you at no charge. PM me if you are interested.
Iven

I will Pm you!

There is an old but good program called DART (digital audio restoration technology) that lets you run specific algorithms from hiss removal too warp correction.
I used this too restore my fathers vynil 78's from his recordings in 1952.

I used too be a recording engineer and would get many requests to restore audio. The tools used are as varied as the damage to the audio and no single solution is used.

If you can digitize it and send it too me I can have a go for you. Just dig' a 30 second bad section and I will diagnose for you as you may need to retrack the players head to the original recorded track position before you digitize.

Much improvement can be found by adjusting the play heads, back, forward, up and down.

Steven Steele.

The best and easiest method for 8mm film xfer is too aquire a projector and film the projection with a modern video camera.

The alternative is a painfully long process of scanning each frame into a computer. Telecines don't handle 8mm anymore so a realtime scan is not on.