Edit a really bad conversation recording

[Paul Campbell]

Is this the correct file? All I’m hearing is a lot of traffic noise, a car door beeping from an open door, and some audio from a radio. Where’s the conversation?

[Bruce Watson]

[Sue Howard] “https://files.creativecow.net/mp3-files”

I downloaded and listened. Very little voice content and what there is sounds highly distorted. I wouldn’t be able to extract anything usable from this. I doubt it’s salvageable. Sorry.

[Richard Crowley]

Sorry. Are you sure you posted the correct sound clip? If you hadn’t claimed that it was a recording of a conversation, I would never have imagined that it was anything of the sort. Every once in a while I think I can hear a few phrases of something that sounds like human speech. But if you hadn’t warned us, I would have dismissed it as just more random noise.

If this were important to international terrorist activity, the NSA may be able to pull something intelligible out of it with several hours work on their supercomputer farms. But for the first time ever online, I have to say that there is zero chance of pulling anything even forensic-grade intelligible from this recording, much less something fit for a production.

It sounds like it was a horrible failure of trying to record dialog with a stereo (or M/S?) microphone where the dialog was completely cancelled out and only the noise remains. We sometimes hear that kind of effect when people plug a monaural microphone into a stereo mic input and end up recording the proper signal on the left channel, and opposite-polarity audio on the right channel. Then whey it is played back in monaural (with L+R), the signal almost completely cancels itself.

If you care to discuss exactly HOW this recording was made (conditions, gear, technique, cabling, etc.) we could probably help you avoid this problem in the future. But I feel pretty confident that even audio recovery software that costs more than your car couldn’t save this recording.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Richard Crowley]

Note that posting a compressed clip (MP3) doesn’t do your case any good. It might be possible there is something salvageable there, but the stereo MP3 compression algorithm has completely destroyed any hope of recovery. If you want detailed analysis of your sample, you must post an uncompressed (WAV, AIFF, etc.) sample. If the recording was made in a compressed format (like MP3) then you are probably out of luck. It is NEVER a good idea to record audio using a compressed method. We always record raw audio data (WAV, AIFF, etc.) for production and NEVER compress it until after the final mix when we need to distribute the product online, etc.

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Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.

[Sue Howard]

Dear all,

Apologies for any inconveniences caused, I am obviously not a techie.

This recording I got it from one of those hidden mic that I put on my husband to find out if he is being unfaithful.

Sorry if I made you all waste your time,