Well, now that I've settled on an editer, thanks to this forum, I have some more general opinion questions.

1) What program is highly recommended and cheap, preferably free, that will remove crackles and pops from vinyl recordings?

2) What program normalizes wavs without sacrificing sound quality? I have yet to find a normalizing program that makes the normalized version sound as good as the original. Why normalize? In the spirit of mix CDs, of course.

3)Any other recommendations on making that vinyl music sound better? I'm pretty satisfied but just wondering if there were any tips out there.

Thanks as usual.

If the normalized version sound worse than the un-normalized version, then the signal is overloading something in your setup. The normalization setup should have no audible effect exept increasing the volume. It affects, because of rounding error, the 16th bit of the signal, and a vinyl have no more than 13 or at most 14 bits of definition (78 and 84 dB of dynamics respectively).

The best way to get normalized wavs is to carefully adjust the analog recording level on your preamp. This way you can get a wav whose peak level is within the top 1.5 dB straight out of the recording.

But maybe do you normalize the RMS level instead of the peak level. In this case, the sound problems likely come from clipping.

Did you try SoundForge ? CoolEdit ? WaveLab ? GoldWave ? ...and do you normalize the peak level to 0 dB or something else ?

1. The only programs I know of handling crackle very well are not cheap ... they are rather expensive. I would suggest you to try out the Waves X-Crackle or Sonic Foundry Noise Reduction 2.0 - both are DX capable and can be accessed from any DX application ... the algorithms in Dart are very capable as well.

2. When it comes to pure normalizing, there should be no significant differences because the normalizing algorithm is very simple. Normalizing is always altering your files due to rounding sample values (not if your reference value is exactly 50% or 16384 and you normalize to 100% or 32768, though due to multiplying every sample with a multitude of 2)

3. You can try to apply some soft eq ... a little bass here, a little treble there might sound well in your ears ...

1. I tested some cheap software once for this and came up with using Waverepair for removing subtle crackle and Groovemechanic for removing clicks/pops as the best alternative. The results were sufficient for me at least.