I want to put my Library Of Congress talking books on the computer. What I need to do is dehiss (cassette tape & machine hiss) the recordings then break them up into 5 minute wav files for burning to audio CD's.
Oh & can the software remove rumble & declick for the old talking book records? Is it able to slow the speed down so a book transferred at 16rpm will sound correct as if played at 8rpm? And can the slowed down files be saved? Thanks!
Most of what you are after can be done by various good audio editor software that I have seen. I am just not sure about the last point you raise and would be interested to hear what others say about it.
I would start at one of the free audio editors that are available and see if it can satisfy all of your requirements. I would suggest "Audacity" for this role. It is a very good program with lots of functions and it is free.
If this does not fit with what you are after, you may have to pay for an editor. I would recommend "Goldwave" and "Soundforge" for this purpose.
I believe that Adobe Audition supports everything you are asking for. And, it also has batch editing possible, so that at least part of what you are wanting to do can be done in a batch process that you will not have to baby sit. I'm guessing you could do probably just about any of it in batch mode, but you'd have to create your own batch file or find one - this is something I've been wondering about doing myself - creating my own batch file or finding others that do what I want done.
Also, I know for a fact that some editors will speed up/slow down audio. That is something I've thought about as well in order to speed up the process of recording analog tapes to digital. That would knock out a bunch of time, and along with batch processing could make it much less painful. When you do it all manual, and you have more than a couple tapes, it can be quite cumbersome - if you want to clean it up real good.
Also, if you want to try a free audio editor, there are a few of those out there, at least possibly 2 that are good (one I forget the name of, and I don't think it's the very best, anyway, maybe second best). Audacity is the best one, in my opinion. It works very much like Adobe Audition, and will do practically everything that Audition will do, save for the batch editing (to the best of my knowledge).
I know that Audition has built in hiss/pop/click removal, and there are extra plugins you can find that possibly do even better. I believe that Audacity has something to that extent as well.
Audition is fairly expensive at around $200. Audacity is 100% free, so if Audacity will handle what you need, I'd go with that first.
If you want to look at Audition, go to www.adobe.com
Also, I glanced realy quick at Audacity 1.3 Beta for the speed option. It has the option under "Effect" - > "Change Speed". I think the 1.3 Beta has more options than the version prior (current "stable" version). The Beta version has worked fine for me, but that doesn't mean that you won't run into problems. You can always try the beta, and then install the prior version if that one doesn't work out.
Also, if you want to work with MP3 files with Audacity, you'll need to download the LAME MP3 encoder. I think they have a link from the Audacity site for it.
