The first thing I did was with a group, we first did a recording of Creedence Clearwater Revivals 1970 record "Cosmo's Factory".

We set up the record player, along with a preamp to get it into pro tools and recorded two songs, "Lookin' Out My Back Door" and "Run Through The Jungle",

Both of these recordings were full of vinyl crackle, and some very loud clicks.

I trimmed the recording in a daw to be just the length of the song I was going to restore.

After recording, I was given a tape recording to also restore, I took both recordings into IZotope's RX to begin restoring the tracks.

I started with the vinyl recording of CCR, first of all I applied the "de-click" module, this tool is used to get rid of the extremely prominent clicks that I could hear in the recording.

I set the sensitivity to be quite high, as having it too low let some clicks through, however I did not set sensitivity to the max, as when I did it began to destroy some of the actual musical elements.

I kept using the output clicks only setting to make sure the module was only removing the clicks and nothing else.

I also slightly upped the click widening as I felt there was still some clicks I could hear, but not too much as to not affect the audio I wanted.

After rendering that effect, I then applied a the "de-crackle" module, I used this to remove the more subtle crackling that while not as obvious as the loud clicks removed by the de-clicking module, it was still present and needed to be removed.

I set the strength of the module very high which removed the crackle, however I did find that going any higher than around 9 would begin to affect the music, I again made use of the output crackle only setting to make sure the module wasn't removing parts of the audio I wanted to keep.

I rendered the audio with the decrackle module applied and exported the audio file.

I then moved onto the tape recording, after listening to it I could tell there was a hum in the lower frequencies, after looking on the rx spectrograph i could see it was located around 100 hz so I cut it with basic editing in rx, I moved onto removing more of the tape noise in the recording, so I used the "spectral de-noise" module.

I selected a point on the spectrograph where there was the least amount of noise, I then went to the module and clicked learn, the module then gathers the frequencies of the noise, I turned down the threshold slightly to get rid of more noise, and set the reduction to 14.6, as any lower began to affect the audio I wanted to keep intact.

Find the link below to hear a before and after restoration comparison of the recordings.

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