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22 Aug 12 - 02:46 AM (#3393460) Subject: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Iona I'm trying to edit a song from an old Lassie Show. It's a lovely song, but it's got dog barking almost constantly, and it's ridiculously annoying. I've tried to fix it in Audacity, but can't seem to get the barking to quiet down without distorting the song too. Any suggestions, or am I asking the impossible? |
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22 Aug 12 - 04:54 AM (#3393494) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,mattk You are essential asking for the impossible If the barking is continuing through sections you want to hear - you cant really isolate it as it will be within a very similar frequency range to an average song - therefore if you chop out the barking frequencies you will also chop out the song/music I worked in a recording studio for 7 years - as a way of giving comments some sort of credibility |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:01 AM (#3393497) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Grishka Yes, it is quite easy: a) shut all windows, choose a time when no dogs are around b) start Audacity c) press "Record" d) sing the song e) press "Stop" f) "Save As".... If you ask a pro like Matt, you never get the obvious answer. |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:27 AM (#3393506) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Stim It's on "Lassie", Grishka. |
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22 Aug 12 - 06:26 AM (#3393520) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Charles Macfarlane > From: GUEST,mattk > > You are essential asking for the impossible That's correct. This has been discussed recently, and probably many times before that, but you wouldn't know it from using Mudcat's search. If you want to find anything in Mudcat, use the following search in Google or Yahoo: site:mudcat.org <usual search terms> In particular ... site:mudcat.org removing noise gives the following thread as first hit: Tech: How to Remove Noise from recordings If you want a more detailed reply, you might find my first post in that thread, from para 5 onwards, a useful starting point. |
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22 Aug 12 - 06:32 AM (#3393523) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Mr Red Audacity is worth every penny. There are programmes that can filter-out audio that is not on pitch (and not harmonically related). But you can assume the barking has all frequencies and will still be there and only reduced a bit. But that assumes you can afford such programmes, and the singing is on pitch too. Basically this is a case of the bark being worse than the bytes. I'll get my coat...................... |
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22 Aug 12 - 07:10 AM (#3393529) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,999 "Basically this is a case of the bark being worse than the bytes." Jaysus, it's 7:09 am here . . . . Good though. |
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22 Aug 12 - 09:38 AM (#3393585) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Arkie I can understand the challenge and you are probably aware that Audacity has a noise removal tool. If you can isolate the barking and copy that you could possible remove the barking from the recording. However, as several have said here, you would probably remove frequencies that are an essential part of the music. The odds at removing only the barking are very slim. If you primarily want a clean version of the song, you might give us the name and any other information and see what happens. |
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22 Aug 12 - 10:06 AM (#3393592) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Amos Soundsoap can leach out the worst of it. Also the barks must peak the amplitudes when they occur of particular frequencies, so if you select those points and compress them, you might find them fading. It won't erase them though. A |
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22 Aug 12 - 10:43 AM (#3393605) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,999 "Removing barking with Audacity?" Shoot the dog. |
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22 Aug 12 - 01:53 PM (#3393677) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Steve Izotope RX spectral repair would probably do it, and there may be a "trial" download that lasts a few days. Steve |
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22 Aug 12 - 02:56 PM (#3393707) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Stim Actually, it would probably be easier to find a recording of the song somewhere else, but we don't know what song it is. I'll bet the dog barking was overdubbed. |
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22 Aug 12 - 04:13 PM (#3393752) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Richard Bridge If I can remove Barking, can I remove the rest of Essex too? |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:20 PM (#3393780) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: ChrisJBrady You could perhaps ask the audio restoration folk at the LOC: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List and also here in the UK: Digitisation History CJB |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:23 PM (#3393782) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: ChrisJBrady Mind you the Beeb never managed to remove barking. I think that it was Folkweave that had 'live' sets from Towersey Folk Festival. There was always a neighbour's dog barking in the background. |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:28 PM (#3393787) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Joe Offer Shoot the dog, 999? This is Lassie you're talking about, bud. You can't shoot Lassie.... |
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22 Aug 12 - 05:33 PM (#3393790) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Peter Butler Try Roland R-Mix. This analyses sound in terms of frequency and position in the stereo image. You can edit or alter specific frequencies in that location. In fact if you send me a 20 second WAV sample (Roland don't recognise the existence of mp3) I'll try it for you. If it works you can either buy R-Mix or I'll do the whole thing for a large amount of money. It might work with a mono track. Send it to peter@etcetera.co.uk Cheers Peter |
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24 Aug 12 - 07:52 AM (#3394432) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Grishka 999, Audacity can do a lot of things, but probably not shoot dogs - that would be against the programmers' ethics (wasn't there a "Law of Robots" somewhere? Now did it include dogs?). Stim: do I really need to add a ;-)? If so, consider it done herewith. |
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24 Aug 12 - 12:26 PM (#3394533) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: ChrisJBrady For some reason the email addresses went missing. You could perhaps ask the audio restoration folk at the LOC: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List ARSCLIST-AT-@LISTSERV.LOC.GOV and also here in the UK: Digitisation History history-digitisation-AT-jiscmail.ac.uk Replace -AT- with @ CJB |
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24 Aug 12 - 01:46 PM (#3394559) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Joe_F Off on a tangent: I have read that some karaoke is generated by filtering a voice out of a recording. Is the complementary operating possible? There are a number of singers whose orchestras annoy me. |
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24 Aug 12 - 05:06 PM (#3394615) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Stim You got me Grishka. |
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25 Aug 12 - 04:50 AM (#3394795) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Eddie1 (Still sans cookie) Am I the only one to find it a bit strange that there has been no response from the OP? Eddie |
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29 Aug 12 - 02:52 PM (#3397136) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Iona @Eddie1 Sorry for my delay in replying. This has been the busiest month I've had in some time, and checking Mudcat kind of fell off the radar. :D @MattK-- that's pretty much what I thought after toying with the audio for an hour or two. ;) @Grikshaw-- good idea, and certainly would reduce the dog sounds, but I'm trying to save the Lassie recording because of who the singer is--and it ain't me! @Charles MacFarlane-- thanks for the thread link! That ought to help, if not for this particular project, certainly for other old recordings I work with (why can't all records be in pristine condition? It's rather annoying! ;). @Mr. Red-- I wish I could get better editing software, but Audacity will have to bark it's way through this one. ;) The barks are definitely worse than the bytes. Yes, indeed. @Arkie-- I'm sorta kinda new to Audacity, not having used it for in-depth edits like this before, but I think when I tried the Noise Removal tool it didn't do much for me. That could mean that it's no good for this project, or it could mean that I haven't the slightest clue how to use it. Maybe both! (by the way, your name now has Doye O'Dells "Okies in Californy" stuck in my head, thanks) @Amos-- Thanks! I'll have to look that program up. @999-- Shoot the dog? Shoot Lassie?! Sacrilege! ;) @Steve-- I will certainly see if they have a trial run. I'm dying to fix that awful barking--if not eliminate it, at least muffle it. But doing that and preserving the singing......*sigh* @Stim-- I wish there WERE a different version! But the thing is that I'm trying to save this version because of who sang it (Ken Carson). I don't think that the original, non-dubbed recording exists. I tried writing to the Lassie organization, but they haven't replied. The song I'm trying to fix is at the end of this program: Clicky @CJB-- I'll ask them! Thanks so much! |
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29 Aug 12 - 04:05 PM (#3397185) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: treewind You can't use the Audacity noise removal tool for this. It is designed for removing a constant background sound like AC hum, a whistle or hiss. You might be able to target the individual barks and mute them or at least attenuate them so they are no louder than the wanted sound - this could be a slow and tedious process and the result won't sound great - instead of barking you'll have dropouts in the sound. The spectrum of the dog barks is probably very similar to that of the music, so you can't do anything with a frequency selective filter. The trick for removing vocals relies on having a stereo recording with the vocal panned dead centre and most of the backing on the right and left - you subtract L from R and get a rather weirdly balanced backing track with not much vocal in it, but it only works on recording that have been made that way, and I'll bet your old Lassie show is mono so no luck there. |
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29 Aug 12 - 04:57 PM (#3397208) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Iona Yeah, the song is mono. :( I'm thinking there's no hope for the song because of that. It's so unlikely that the original recording still survives, and if it did, what chance could there possibly be of my finding it? Hardly any! |
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29 Aug 12 - 05:34 PM (#3397226) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Bernard A slightly different approach that I've just tried (successfully) on the first few bars, but it will take time - pick out sounds from elsewhere in the sound file that roughly match the sounds the dog barks over, and copy-paste them over. You may not get rid of every single bark, but most of them. Fortunately the guitar accompaniment is... erm... uncomplicated! Okay, I'm quite used to doing such edits, and find it relatively easy to do - but it is painstaking and slow. I use SoundForge, but for this kind of thing Audacity will do almost as well. The advantage is that you're not trying to filter out the noise, but replace it, so the results should be seamless. The audio is mono (as Treewind suspected), and not that good to start with... it's nearer to telephone quality, really - 22050Hz, 16 bit. Be careful when copying and pasting that you try to set the markers in 'null points' - where the sound wave crosses the 'centre line'. That will avoid nasty clicks. |
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29 Aug 12 - 05:37 PM (#3397229) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Bernard Sorry - cross-posting there! My approach is more likely to be successful with a mono file, fortunately!! |
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30 Aug 12 - 04:43 PM (#3397774) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Grishka Now (for a change) a serious proposal, though not really likely to succeed, and a lot of work: All the barks seems to be copies of a single recorded bark, which can be heard alone at the beginning. Now, if this were a digital mixing, and if it were an uncompressed format such as .wav rather than .mp3, you could try to literally subtract the barks from the song, perhaps with varying amplification. (No toungue-in-cheek this time!) With the mp3 format, one might still achieve a substantial reduction, but if the mixing was done from non-digital tapes, my (uninformed) guess is that chances are little. I wonder what Matt thinks of this ides. -- Somewhere I read that the Lassie from the films was actually a dozen of male dogs (which are easier to train). So indeed you can't shoot Lassie, he will be resurrected whenever a new generation of kids asks for her. |
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31 Aug 12 - 06:49 AM (#3398004) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: Bernard It did sound to me as if there were a couple of different barks, but I agree it does sound as if most of them are one and the same, repeated. If I get time over the weekend I'll try presenting the 'clean' bark out of phase to some of the others to see what happens - though it will still be quite time consuming. For those who don't understand what I mean... if you play a sound 'out of phase' with itself, you should theoretically get silence - one cancels the other out. An example is two loudspeakers, one connected normally, and the other with the connections reversed. Because this is an acoustic environment, you tend only to get the bass frequencies disappearing, so everything sounds a bit 'thin' until you correctly connect the second loudspeaker. However, when you take a digital signal and present it out of phase to itself, there are no other factors present so one should cancel the other. This is the principle of 'common mode rejection', a technique of balancing a signal down a 'twisted pair' cable so that induced noise is rejected. Think of a sine wave, then present an exact inverted sine wave over it, and the result is a straight line... |
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11 Jun 13 - 08:02 PM (#3525395) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: GUEST,Brandon it's easy you import the track then you seperate the stereo tracks then choose the bottom one (double click) then you go to effect->Invert then you turn the input to left then you combine them back! |
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12 Jun 13 - 08:07 AM (#3525556) Subject: RE: Removing barking with Audacity? From: treewind "seperate the stereo tracks" It's already been established that this is a mono recording. |