Looking for some help! PLEASE, everyone read!

[Undefined]

I know a lot of you guys are smart, especially when it comes to this type of stuff (I lurk here A LOT). So any help would be greatly appreciated. Does anyone here know anyone who can "remaster" songs, or anyone here able to do it themselves? Not sure if 'remaster' is the term, I'm looking for someone to make a really bad quality bootleg/song into something audible/better or good quality. For example, if any of you know how the Children of Bodom 'Inearthed' demos where very shitty quality, lots of distortion and shit that made it very hard to listen to and enjoy, then someone made them better and very listenable, not sure how they did or what program they used, but apparently it is possible and I'm just looking for some help from anyone who could do this. If someone can help me out, I would appreciate it very, very much. And I'll owe you a solid favour.

Here is the link to the songs, it's from a band called Ved Buens Ende, they are no longer together, and this is just a live audio bootleg. Anyone who can help make them sound better is going to be my official hero, because the band rocks, just bothers me to hear it in such low quality.

http://rapidshare.com/files/106001466/Ved_Buens_Ende_-_...Coiled_in_Obscurity.rar

P.S. Mods, as far as I know I'm not doing anything wrong, but if I'm not allowed to post links to bootlegs (eventhough I've seen it permitted for others to do so) then just remove the link, please leave the thread here. Thanks.

 

[Kenneth R.]

Yeah, it's possible to an extent. It's not really remastering, just touching up with some EQ and noise reduction filters. It can only do so much though.

 

[razoredge]

We need to do this very same thing. We have two cassette tapes recorded live of songs we were working on years ago. The guy who sang and co wrote the songs with me died last year. These are all we have of his voice and want to clean them up and get them on CD. Of course we wish we could punch in better playing tracks as they are laden with mistakes and "opps... where the hell are we" screw ups as we were just putting them together.

We had one guy tell our drummer he could even break them down and seperate the instruments, not that Im a believer, and the fact that he wont return any phone calls makes me more of a non believer.

 

[Undefined]

Yeah, it's possible to an extent. It's not really remastering, just touching up with some EQ and noise reduction filters. It can only do so much though.

Could you do that? I've played with the EQ on iTunes but it doesn't let me save it as a new mp3 or whatever so I couldn't share the new version with others or really listen to it fixed unless I was using iTunes. I don't even know of I program that would let me change the EQ and save it. Like I said, not sure if remaster was the word, but minor clean up and making the vocals better would make me happy. Another thing is I'm not a musician so I'd rather have someone else with a good ear fix these, not jus for me but for other fans as well, if you could help Ken I'd appreciate it eternally.

 

[Kenneth R.]

cool edit pro (old versions only) or audacity are good free DAWs you can use. I can maybe do this for you and Steve tomorrow when I have lots of time on my hands.

 

[Undefined]

cool edit pro (old versions only) or audacity are good free DAWs you can use. I can maybe do this for you and Steve tomorrow when I have lots of time on my hands.

Thanks man, I have been playing with the EQ on itunes, found sometihng I like, maybe not for everyone, but it only let me save it as a preset then I have to play it through itunes, is there any program I can use that will let me play with the eq but then save it as a new mp3?

 

[Kenneth R.]

the two i listed in the post you quoted.

 

[CantoX]

The best way to do this is if the instruments were all recorded separately and if you actually had those tracks, but you have straight recordings so just playing around with noise reduction in programs like Adobe Audition or any music recording software you are familiar with can help a lot. Maybe some Parametric EQ changes or even a little compression can help.
Like Ken mentioned, audacity and cool edit pro are free and you can basically do the same things in those programs.

You can't save an audio track on itunes after you have the EQ on it. There actually is a way, but the quality would be sucky so it's pointless.

 

[anacrucix]

We need to do this very same thing. We have two cassette tapes recorded live of songs we were working on years ago. The guy who sang and co wrote the songs with me died last year. These are all we have of his voice and want to clean them up and get them on CD. Of course we wish we could punch in better playing tracks as they are laden with mistakes and "opps... where the hell are we" screw ups as we were just putting them together.

We had one guy tell our drummer he could even break them down and seperate the instruments, not that Im a believer, and the fact that he wont return any phone calls makes me more of a non believer.

to seperate the instruments would be near impossible from a stereo recording, their are methods of extracting single instrument from stereo recordings, but most of these rely on the instrument being centrally placed (e.g not panned) and the technique most commonly used is reverse phase cancellation. This is how people generate acapella versions of songs if they only have the original to play with.

The sort of processing youd need to get a good sound out of a live recording would probably be the work of a mastering engineer- or even someone more specialised, the prices of mastering in my area start at around £100 a track, and for that you are paying for years of expert knowledge in the field and specialised hardware that currently just cannot be emulated with software.

 

[Kenneth R.]

And you'd be wasting your money unless you really needed it badly.

 

[razoredge]

Im a bit surprised it can actually be done. We dont need anything badly but in this case this guys voice is gone from us forever and the songs that were recorded were in the early stage, we were in the early stage of growing as players and making our own music, so they are laden with some pretty dramatic mistakes

 

[Kenneth R.]

Don't expect crystal clear quality, but this should be a slight improvement:

http://rapidshare.com/files/106217116/Ved_Buens_Ende_-_...Coiled_in_Obscurity.zip.html

 

[Undefined]

Don't expect crystal clear quality, but this should be a slight improvement:

http://rapidshare.com/files/106217116/Ved_Buens_Ende_-_...Coiled_in_Obscurity.zip.html

Thanks a lot man, this is awesome compared to the original, I really, really appreciate this!

 

[Kenneth R.]

No problem. If you did what anacrucix said, you'd get a better version, but you'd spend a lot that probably isn't worth it.

 

[Eternal Dragon]

The best way to do this is if the instruments were all recorded separately and if you actually had those tracks, but you have straight recordings so just playing around with noise reduction in programs like Adobe Audition or any music recording software you are familiar with can help a lot. Maybe some Parametric EQ changes or even a little compression can help.
Like Ken mentioned, audacity and cool edit pro are free and you can basically do the same things in those programs.

You can't save an audio track on itunes after you have the EQ on it. There actually is a way, but the quality would be sucky so it's pointless.

Yeah exactly. Its hard to apply filters overall when you've got such a broad array of frequencies. Separate tracks could end up sounding quite cool even if they were recorded shitly.

 

[OfSinsAndShred]

I can mess around with it a little bit, too. Give me some time to fuck around with it and see what I can come up with.