It's pretty easy to remove some - or indeed, all - of the noise, but I prefer to let my brain do the filtering and retain the treble brightness. I guess it's a matter of personal taste.

Of course, it's best to introduce as little noise as possible in the first place and although my recording was made on a good system, the tape deck I used to record it on to my computer had seen better days.

There are two main ways of reducing the noise:

1) Applying a standard hiss-reduction filter.

2) Using a custom noise profile. This involves taking a sample of background noise from the very beginning of the tape - before the actual recording begins - and using it as a sample of the frequencies to be removed from the entire recording.

I've used both methods on Part One of the suite in the WAV editor, Adobe Audition, and converted the files to 320 kb/ps MP3s for anyone interested in the results.

The processed files can be downloaded here:

01 - Peter Bellamy - The Maritime Suite Pt One (Custom Noise Reduction).zip

http://tinyurl.com/388x9ng


01 - Peter Bellamy - The Maritime Suite Pt One (Hiss Reduced).zip


http://tinyurl.com/334qy2s


Let me know if you think this is an improvement and if there's any demand, I'll do Part Two and perhaps the FLACs as well.