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Topic: Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's (Read 4958 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

First off, I apologize if this comes off as a stupid question. I did use the search feature before posting this, seems I did not get the specific info I was looking for. I also will probably sound like a serious AUDIO NEWBIE with the wording used here. Please try and translate ...hehe.

I have done my rounds in various places looking for music that is simply OUT OF PRINT. We are talking about stuff that you will not find on Amazon.com, or your local music outlet.

Anyhow the point I am trying to make is, the people who have recorded/ripped these songs and placed in mp3 format did a terrible JOB!

What I was wondering is if there are any other people like me out there that try to fix these songs up to sound better. I have played with Sound Forge, Cool Edit and the various plugin's that accompany them and just cant seem to get these song sounding better. Here is the steps I take and the type of scenerio's I am dealing with.


1) Sound is Low, as if volume is reduced.

I open the file in Sound Forge and in SOME cases get very lucky and find that the .wav is just low volume. I then increase the level in 3db increments until I achieve the level I like, and then re-compress in LAME.

However most of the time, these files that sound like they were recorded low sometimes show as clipping when I playback the .WAV in the editor (I never understood why this is the case). I tried to normalize the file, use a Limiter plugin on it (just makes the file loud, but the quality is lost cause everything is maxxed out in all frequency ranges.

Last resort is to load a realtime EQ (Realtime playback plugin for Soundforge or Cool Edit). This has saved my ass a few times, but still later when I play the song on a different system it just does not sound right (maybe 2 much trebile, bass, ...etc).



2) Sound has hiss and vinyl crackle in it.

This part is EASY. There are some good plugins out there for Soundforge and Cool Edit that do the job. I tend to have no problem in this area.


3) Someone made a lame attempt to edit the file they released (Bad Eqlization, Loudness, Clipping)

These sound files kick my BUTT!!! Is there any hope in this situation, steps that can be tried?



==========================================================================


Basically it comes down to this. There are utils out there like "Steinberg Clean, DART" that can fix up music with hiss, crackles (I.E. - Tapes, Vinyl). However what about the loss of quality in these recording, such as those highs, lows, and midrange ...what about the loudness..etc.


In a Nut Shell


Does anyone out there take poor quality music releases .mp3, Vinyl, casssette and try to RE-MASTER the product to sound as close to original as before?


Q: What tools do you use?

Q: What steps do you go through when fixing these sound files.



I know different audio requires different techniques to fix up quality of output.  I am basically making this post in hopes of being pointed in the right direction. I have some GOOD SONGS here that are in need of repair. I have dabbled with a few tools and techniques as mentioned above. Does someone have any advice on how to better enhance the material?


/salute to HydroAudio and Fellow Posters here.



Cupelix

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #1 –
Tho only tool that does no further harm to your music is MP3Gain. If volime is too low, you may apply "max noclip gain" to you file.

Decoding, removing crackles/hiss and re-encodeing will introduce new artifacts. If ever, I only would do this on MP3 files encoded at high bitrate (>= 256 kBit/s) and with a good encoder (newer LAME or FHG). But again, this will probably make it sound worse than with crackles/hiss.

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #2 –
Use mp3gain to increase the volume in your mp3s. This will not only save you from having to re-encode your files, but also use a better way of changing the volume.

As for wrong EQ settings, try to adjust the player you're using at the time. Again, you want to save yourself the decode/re-encode step which does no good to your mp3 files at all.

Tools like Steinberg's clean! are great, but do the same as the built-in plugins in Cooledit, Wavelab et al. There are more expensive tools available, but that might be budget overkill, in particular since you report no problems in this area.

I have done quite a bit of restoring over the years (and so have many others in this forum), but I believe most people restore from original recordings, not from mp3 files. Once a file has been compressed with a lossy codec you're already in trouble, me thinks...

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #3 –
I experienced some good results from ... tadaaa ... Nero Burning ROM's Internal Wav Editor. Sometimes, you will encounter MP3 files with a very hard lowpass (e.g. old XING 128 kbps files that sound like they are played underwater) ... Nero's wav editor has this neat feature called "High Frequency ReBirth" which can add "virtual" overtones to the original signal ... I found out that it will not always really help, but it is always worth giving it a try to listen if any progress can be made by applying this filter (which comes from Syntrillium if I remember right) ...

Anyway, by using EQ/Dynamics and other filters, you will not make the sound better, but you can make the files sound less worse IMO ...
The name was Plex The Ripper, not Jack The Ripper

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #4 –
you might try to decode the file with winamp/apollo/whatever with the "audiostocker" DSP-plugin turned on.
it's no limiter, but a compressor.
it also features a 3-band auto-eq.
you can disable the compressor and/or auto-eq, and configure the strength of the effects.
sure worth a try, especially for recordings from records.

before that you could use mp3-gain to set the max. volume without clipping.
after that you might want to remove cracks & stuff...
or you could remove cracks before the audio-stocker, and just process the .wav (without the cracks) with audiostocker using winamp/apollo/whatever...

and then recompress to mp3 with lame/whatever using about double the bitrate of the original file...

or maybe you even find a winamp-plugin that can do the de-crackle stuff.
then you could leave all the files un-altered, and just use a plugin-stacker to apply audiostocker and the de-crackle plugin while playback...

bye,
--hustbaer

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #5 –
This isn't a technical solution, but --

If the music is seriously out of print, and the only copies you can find on the web are badly damaged, your best bet might be to visit your local library.  This isn't as silly as it might sound.  Even if your library doesn't have a CD or LP collection, or if they have only a small one, they might well be part of a larger network of libraries, one of whom will have the album you want; and then they can get it for you via interlibrary loan.  Often they can request an item from libraries even farther afield, though that might carry a $1 - $5 charge, depending on distance and difficulty.

Many reference librarians love a challenge, and it's possible that the more obscure the item is, the more help you'd get in finding it.

Give it a try.  It has worked for me in the past, and it's bound to be simpler than massaging a badly shredded mp3.

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #6 –
Another approach might be to contact record labels or local radio stations directly for oop records ... ebay can be a good alternative, too ... and there are some sellers on the web that are specialized on rare music ...
The name was Plex The Ripper, not Jack The Ripper

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #7 –
Along the lines of finding out of print music, http://www.gemm.com/ is an indispensible resource.

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #8 –
Quote

Quote
you might try to decode the file with winamp/apollo/whatever with the "audiostocker" DSP-plugin turned on.


Thanks so much for the advice. I did some digging around and found that the product you mentioned is now called Octimax = Link Here.

I have been playing with this util vs the Sound Editing plugin utils for Maximizing and once done comparing original sound file to the enhanced it sounds good. I even ran it through the spectrum analyser plugin and saw that nothing was being maximized, in fact the wave form did not look all peaked. I still have some playing to do, but I just wanted to THANK YOU Hustbear for pointing me in the right direction for fixing BAD MP3's.

Cupelix

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #9 –
If you decode the mp3 to add any effects to it, may I suggest that you then re-encode it with a lossless encoder (Monkey's, FLAC, etc.)
"You can fight without ever winning, but never win without a fight."  Neil Peart  'Resist'

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #10 –
Just to clarify something not yet really mentioned...

Re-encoding mp3s a second time is called "transcoding" and around here, transcoding is a major no-no. Lossy audio codecs remove information - encoding twice will remove twice the information! Transcoding will sound okay when the source is a really high-quality MP3 (which, unless you make them following the instructions on this site, are extremely hard to find), but the new MP3 will NEVER sound as good as the first MP3.

Like others have said, if you want to change the volume WITHOUT transcoding, use mp3gain. I highly recommend against doing anything else.

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #11 –
Quote
Re-encoding mp3s a second time is called "transcoding" and around here, transcoding is a major no-no. Lossy audio codecs remove information - encoding twice will remove twice the information! Transcoding will sound okay when the source is a really high-quality MP3 (which, unless you make them following the instructions on this site, are extremely hard to find), but the new MP3 will NEVER sound as good as the first MP3.

Well, fixing item no 2) in cupelix list should be worth the loss due to transcoding. At least to me, vinyl crackle and hiss is far more irritating than the degradation due to transcoding. And if you use -aps then the loss is minimal. If thats not good enough, then use lossless as mentioned earlier.

Personally I think it is not fair to say that transcoding is always bad, no matter what. Obviously, when you have an MP3 with a lot of audible crackle or hiss or similar, it should be better to decode, remove the crackle/hiss, and then encode (lossy) again. I would perceive this transcoded MP3 to sound better than the original.

BTW, maybe this process isn't called transcoding, since you actually perform some additional processing between decoding and encoding. If transcoding only means decoding and encoding again, and absolutely nothing in between, then of course I agree that transcoding is always bad quality-wise.

Re-mastering the Bad Mp3's

Reply #12 –
Re-encoding a file that has already undergone psychoacoustic lossy compression is generally called transcoding, even if you do some other editing to that file.

Rather than saying quality is lost, which is usually true, one can certainly say that fidelity and transparency may be lost (i.e. differences and distortions from the original sound that may become perceptible).

In your case, you have a sound that's already different from the original performance, thanks to bad encoding or other degradation (e.g. hiss and crackle). You plan to make artificial changes to improve the perceived quality and enjoyment, but you are not aiming to make it sound more like the original sound (i.e. you're likely to lose fidelity).

Fidelity is usually the quality objective people are aiming for with HiFi lossy coders like Musepack and LAME, and indeed that's all ABX testing measures - perceived differences, not caring whether they sound nicer than the original (rare) or worse (most common).

It's fidelity that's lost with the act of lossy transcoding, and you will degrade fidelity when you do it. However, the other changes you're doing may make it sound more pleasant to your ears and outweigh any minor loss of pleasantness caused by re-encoding (transcoding). After all, these MP3s have mostly been badly encoded with distortions well above the psychoacoustic limits that LAME APS or Musepack Standard would allow. You might suppress these effects by some form of processing to make them less annoying, and be happy to trade off some fidelity to do so (heck, some people actually run plugins to ADD vinyl crackle and rumble to their music to lower its fidelity, or buy warm-sounding tube amps which lower fidelity but distort in a musically pleasant manner when driven hard).

Anyhow, if you started with a 128kbps encode, the distortions are already quite large in most cases. Re-encoding with a recommended VBR encoder after processing wouldn't add very much further distortion to that already present, but it will try to encode the audible distortions you've already got.

I'd strongly recommend labelling the files in more than one way to indicate that they've been heavily processed and transcoded with as much info as you have. This helps you, when you rediscover a backup tape or CD-R or a forgotten folder of music, and anyone else who comes across the same files. E.g. run Encspot to guess/detect the original encoder, make a note of processing done and the encoder settings used to re-encode then add this info to the tag comment field of the new file (e.g. MP3 Xing(new) 128kbps > Octimax 'Rock' > Lame3.90.3 APS)

It's a good idea to include something like TRANSCODE or PROCESSED in the filename and the folder name to indicate that although it looks like a Lame APS, Ogg Vorbis -q5 or Musepack standard file that's usually associated with high fidelity, it's actually not a close match to the original. (I have some FM radio rips of stuff such as old vinyl that's incredibly rare and hard to find but contains a beautiful version of a song, so I was careful to indicate something like '1965 Vinyl > FM > VHSHiFi > CoolEdit96 NR30 > l3enc 256kbps -hq MP3' processing chain in the comments, which is useful when coming back to the file 5 years on, as I did recently).

It's also good, if you can, to store the original bad file, in case you become dissatisfied with side-effects of the processing you did and can try something new that comes along in the future to add some life back to it. (e.g. an artificial stereo enhancement effect or a better decrackle algorithm). Also, you might discover that an awful low-bitrate file with .MP3 extension was infact an MP3pro where you can partially reconstruct the higher frequencies if you have the proper MP3pro decoder, which you might have lacked originally (it's still not great quality, but not bad for 64 or 96 kbps).