Old 04-25-2019, 03:53 PM   #1
Paul99
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Default I'm screwed, am I? (SOLVED)

Dear Reaper fans,

I have got a video of somebody speeching, where at certain moments he is too enthusiastic so the audio sounds distorted.

When I use SWS/BR: Analyze Loudness, these are the numbers:
-11.9 LUFS, Range: 13.0 LU, True peak: 0.1 dBTP

I tried normalizing to -23.0 LUFS, but the distorted moments stay present.

What can I possibly do to correct the distorted sound moments or am I screwed?

Last edited by Paul99; 04-27-2019 at 07:01 AM. Reason: SOLVED
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Old 04-25-2019, 04:06 PM   #2
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If it is clipping you could try this or the Izotope tools:
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Old 04-25-2019, 04:13 PM   #3
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https://blog.wavosaur.com/free-decli...ng-distorsion/
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Old 04-25-2019, 05:17 PM   #4
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Thanks, I am gonna look into those tips!
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Old 04-25-2019, 06:10 PM   #5
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I’ve used iZotope RX de-clip and it is magical removing clips of audio. I use RX almost exclusively for that.
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Old 04-26-2019, 12:35 AM   #6
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PM me ... maybe I can help you
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Old 04-26-2019, 12:47 AM   #7
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Wow, that’s cool! Do those tools actually / reasonably repair the clipped audio?
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Old 04-26-2019, 04:19 AM   #8
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Hopi, pm sent!
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Old 04-26-2019, 08:09 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by +NRG View Post
Wow, that’s cool! Do those tools actually / reasonably repair the clipped audio?
Yep. You can try with the evaluation version. At least to me it have repaired all of my clipped tracks, even some of them with severe clipping issues.
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Old 04-26-2019, 08:15 AM   #10
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Originally Posted by patriciocs View Post
Yep. You can try with the evaluation version. At least to me it have repaired all of my clipped tracks, even some of them with severe clipping issues.

Good to know! Thanks for the info! B)
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Old 04-26-2019, 08:47 AM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by +NRG View Post
Wow, that’s cool! Do those tools actually / reasonably repair the clipped audio?
If it's just the tops of the waves grazed off at the converters, you can get magical transparent results!

If the poor thing is pummeled to the point of saturated and sounds like it went through a meat grinder... you'll have to roll up your sleeves for more work.

If it's really crossed the line, then yeah, you're screwed!

Otherwise...

See how far the clip repair takes it.

Separate out the really stepped on distorted bits into a new track. (Or multiple tracks if there are multiple levels of destruction.)

You'll find that the saturated bits have the very high end of the spectrum truncated. There will be some saturation and blooming in the high mids. The lower end of the spectrum will often be truncated too.

You can at least eq this track to get things back in the ballpark so those bits don't just jump out and smack you upside the head.

After that...
Perhaps the vocal could sound good with a saturated lo-fi-ish "amped up" sound overall in the mix?
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Old 04-26-2019, 08:47 AM   #12
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You can try without the specific tools. There are several things to try that don't remove the distortion but make it less obvious. It depends how many instances there are and what the length of the offensive audio is, if it's short transient bursts or full seconds. The former is worth trying to just lessen with editing techniques. I use a combination of midrange notch and a few db level drop if it's just a blast from a clipped shout, and I'll often add the strategy that if it goes by faster it will be noticed less, so I'll cut a few alternating cycles, zero crossing to zero crossing, to see if I can make the offensive sound go by quicker and unnoticed without harming the comprehension, since it's happening over only one syllable of one word. I find that kind of time compressing works better than actually time compressing by opt-dragging the item edge, but again since it's such a teeny and lightning fast bit of audio being artifacty for 100 milliseconds may totally be lost in the wash. Sometimes simply making the distorted part go by in 100 mill instead of 200 is all you need.

Where the whole audio is over modulating you can't get away with this, of course, but for a few handfuls of problem spots it can be worth it.
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Old 04-26-2019, 08:50 AM   #13
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Great info! I may need it at some point...
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Old 04-26-2019, 12:13 PM   #14
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Paul.... plz check your email
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Old 04-26-2019, 04:41 PM   #15
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Paul.... plz check your email
Yes I did and I can say: you did a great job sir. Those recordings were really super bad distorted but you managed to clean the mess for a great part out of it. Unbelievable result. Thank you!
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Old 04-27-2019, 07:04 AM   #16
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I can say that Hopi did a great job in removing terrible distortion in a vocal recording that in fact was totally unusable. I did not think it would have been possible to correct this kind of bad recordings!

So again, Hopi thank you very much for your great help and I know now that it is possible to correct a bad recording in cases where it is impossible to record again and you have to do the job with your ruined audio!
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Old 04-27-2019, 08:16 AM   #17
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Quote:
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Paul.... plz check your email
How did you do it?
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Old 04-27-2019, 10:38 AM   #18
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Quote:
How did you do it?
I'd love to hear some before and after stuff.
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Old 04-27-2019, 11:37 AM   #19
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what I did:

Ok... well firstly you gotta have a sense of what the audio is...
A 'talk' by Anthony Robbins at one of his events with thousands of people.

At various times he is 'encouraging' them through some 'exercises' by screaming into the mic... add to that that his voice is already blown from what must have been 'going Uber' with other screaming... hahaha So not only was it clipped but it was very distorted in many ways...

So, impossible to really 'restore' to sweetness but Paul just needed something passable...

OK mostly used a chain of the RX6 FX's... I won't go into too much detail but you can imagine each FX in the chain fixed something and the following FX did other improvements... It took some experimentation to get a decent ordering of the FX and to tweak them.

Now you know RX stuff on it's 'best' settings gets to be too CPU hungry for real time... so did it in the lowest setting while listening and then set to 'best' and rendered at 1xOffline and added the result to the project as a new track...

And then ran a second set of RX FX on that to reach what I thought would be a 'decent' compromise. The last FX in both chains was the FabFilter limiter, actually to bring up the level a little while still keeping it well below any clipping.
Again, rendered at 1xOffline.

Pretty simple really but trying to fix stuff like this is always going to be a compromise. The tonality of the voice changes, but you can still get something 'acceptable' for certain needs whereas the original was totally useless otherwise.

For what it's worth, I did try other things but all those were much less effective. Again, it was not really just a simple 'clipping' problem... it was a complex clipping and distortion thing.

EDIT: ok here are small examples of before and after:

https://stash.reaper.fm/36191/repair%20examples.zip
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Last edited by hopi; 04-27-2019 at 12:11 PM.
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Old 04-27-2019, 03:25 PM   #20
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Impressive. Thanks for posting, Hopi.
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Old 04-27-2019, 03:28 PM   #21
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Quote:
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Impressive. Thanks for posting, Hopi.
yer welcome... and glad you liked it... but truly the 'impressive' credit is all for iZotope... great products! hahaha just keep your cpu cool

me? hell I just clk'd some buttons...
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Old 04-27-2019, 04:19 PM   #22
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Quote:
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me? hell I just clk'd some buttons...
You're selling yourself short Hopi. You really did more than that!
I know, because the one example you gave here was only one of the better parts and didn't come even close to the really terrible ones were you did a very great job in cleaning up the mess!
I won't deny that iZotope is a damn fine piece of software, but it always takes good skills to get good results!
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