Cleaning up audio peaks

[tony240sx]

Ok, so I think I just may have to live with this but was wondering if there was any way to clean up peaks in badly recorded sound. I have been commissioned to clean up some video clips and edit them down for an instructional dvd that I did not record. They used a bad mic or just did not monitor the sound but it clips pretty badly. You can clearly hear what he says but most words peak at the end and just sound like crap. I lowered the levels and normalized. I removed all of the background noise to clean it up but the peaks make my speakers buzz and I want them out. I am pretty new to audio tweaking so any help would be appreciated. I have FCP, Soundtrack Pro and even though I have never used it, I have Adobe Soundbooth that came with the Production Suite.

 

[gpforet]

I guess if you really had to, you could paint the waveform of every clipped wave but, dang, that would take forever and a day. I know of no effective way to un-clip a overdriven waveform. Sorry.

 

[BPistone]

Peaks...

Peaks...

If audio levels peak when digitally sampled, it is truncated and the distortion is not easily fixed for the better. I have Waves Restoration bundle, which works well for noise reduction, but not so well with declipping.

This bundle looks cool: http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/

Some other forum mentioned Nero WaveEditor 3. Also check out tapeop.com for info from some of the best audio engineers.

 

[Noiz2]

Rx can do a decent job of turning digital distortion into what sounds much more like analog distortion. And sometimes even better. They should have a free trial.

 

[nyquist-x]

I second Noiz, RX saved me several times with production takes with digital clipping and stuff. go wi the trial