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02-17-2021, 11:07 AM
MetalSlug3 MetalSlug3 is offline
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Hi everyone,
I've been trying to recover the original VHS dub of a cartoon I've grown up with.

I'm almost done, but I have a ~15-second "hole" that was missing from my first VHS (maybe the tape had gone bad or was recorded over). So I've bought two second hand copies just to digitize those last 15 seconds.

Both those copies have really bad audio, with an almost constant electrical buzz going on throughout them. It's a crackly noise that looks like this on the spectrogram:


I've attached a sample of the very audio I'm trying to recover. It's the same 20 seconds captured 4 times, followed by a clean sample of the buzz from a "silent" bit of the tape.
The VCR I use is a Panasonic NV-HS1000 that's been great for all my other tape captures, both audio and video wise. I'd love to try another VCR to test the audio there but I don't have another working one.

I've tried the Audacity Noise Reduction tool but it's been useless. the buzz is till very much there.

Is there any way of cleaning this through software?
Thanks for your help!


Attached Files
File Type: wav vuk.buzzy.wav (17.78 MB, 5 downloads)
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  #2  
02-17-2021, 11:45 AM
MetalSlug3 MetalSlug3 is offline
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SOLVED - It's amazing what reading instruction manuals can achieve.

The problem with this tape is that the HIFI audio track is busted--not sure why
I found in the manual how to force the standard linear audio track. The buzz completely disappeared and left me with a good-sounding audio track with no distorsions, only a higher noise floor that I can clean up much more easily.

If mods are OK with this, I'd like to leave this up in the hope that some future people save themselves a few hours of banging their head against the wall
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02-18-2021, 03:25 AM
timtape timtape is online now
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Glad you were able to select the linear audio track only, but yes another deck may play the HiFi track a lot better. Even your own deck in expert hands could possibly play it back with much reduced noise.

Unfortunately the noisier linear tracks cant be digitally "cleaned up" to match the quietness of a properly working HiFi track. It's impossible.

I once was given a VHS tape where the customer complained that there was no sound track accompanying the vision. It turned out the original recording recorded both linear and HiFi tracks but the actual sound was only routed to the linear track. Most HiFi playback decks when they sense a HiFi signal will switch to to HiFi, assuming there will be sound there. In this case it caused the owner to assume no sound was recorded, but it was there all the time on the linear track. Of course a non HiFi deck would have played the linear audio track straight away without needing to switch anything.

Last edited by timtape; 02-18-2021 at 03:41 AM.
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