Botched audio job recovery
 

I recently pulled together a live broadcast of a battle of the bands show here at school. The broadcast went fine, but for some reason the audio on the recording of the show is WAY too low. Barely audible with headphones. I don't know why this happened, but I think it has something to do with running the audio into the Tape In input on the soundboard, since I've never had a problem before with other inputs. Anyway, that's not important.

Is there a best way to recovery the audio? Right now I'm just bringing it into Soundtrack Pro, normalizing, then apply a denoise filter. The denoise filter kind of warps the audio, though, and I'm having trouble finding a nice medium point.

Unfortunately there's no good answer. Think of the sound recording as an underexposed photograph. You can push the gain up in post, but it's going to be a lot noisier. I've played with a few noise reduction tools - while many are suitable for removing low, constant noise, I have yet to find one that can correct serious noise problems without distortion.

The math in a noise-reduction algorithm doesn't work well if there's too much noise in your signal to begin with.

Just downloaded this application yesterday as a demo. Very pricey, but they have found a way to remove the artifacts of aggressive noise reduction.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/

-gb-