'Wobbly' sound from audio recording - suggested fixes?

hughtrimble · 17 Mar 2017 at 15:57

Afternoon all,

I've got a sound recording that has very 'wobbly' sound - it's from an old audio cassette, and it seems to have suffered from inconsistent speed during recording, resulting in slow-downs and speed-ups and thus pitch and tempo changes.

Is there a programme that can automatically go through and make the recording 'consistent' or is it a case of doing what I'm doing currently, which is manually finding the speed changes and fiddling with the track speed to get it to sound more in line with the rest of the recording?

I'm converting it to digital for a friend's father's birthday, and as he likes to play along to old recordings on his rather nice Gibson hollow body guitar, sound consistency is quite important!

Any help and suggestions for this would be much appreciated.

Hugh

dazzlaa · 19 Mar 2017 at 08:54

I use Ableton live for producing and it has a warp feature which "can" in theory do this.
It does however sound like it would be potentially a right pain in the backside assuming the software does not automatically assign the warp points correctly. If it did assign them correctly it could be a simple job but I doubt it would be accurate. If you wanted to provide me a Dropbox link I could load it up and check for you?

hughtrimble · 19 Mar 2017 at 16:14

dazzlaa said:
I use Ableton live for producing and it has a warp feature which "can" in theory do this.
It does however sound like it would be potentially a right pain in the backside assuming the software does not automatically assign the warp points correctly. If it did assign them correctly it could be a simple job but I doubt it would be accurate. If you wanted to provide me a Dropbox link I could load it up and check for you?

That's very kind of you dazzlaa, but fortunately I managed to get around most of the issues by recording the tape multiple times, and cutting in those parts that were fine on one recording, but wobbly on another! I very much appreciate your kind offer though.

dazzlaa · 20 Mar 2017 at 06:33

hughtrimble said:
That's very kind of you dazzlaa, but fortunately I managed to get around most of the issues by recording the tape multiple times, and cutting in those parts that were fine on one recording, but wobbly on another! I very much appreciate your kind offer though.

Hey no worries at all, glad you got it fixed. Sounds like it was a painful experience though! Haha how long did it take to do?

hughtrimble · 20 Mar 2017 at 10:34

dazzlaa said:
Hey no worries at all, glad you got it fixed. Sounds like it was a painful experience though! Haha how long did it take to do?

It was painful at first, having spent a couple of hours manually tweaking the speed of little sections to get the tempo and pitch right, so that it actually fit with the rest of the track! But then came the parts where there were gradual changes in pitch due to the recording's slowing down, which meant making incremental adjustments for tiny sections to get it all sounding 'right', and that's when I gave up and asked on here.

Then tried re-recording to see if that would make a difference, and it revealed that much of the problem was down to the tape player itself, varying the speed of the playback and subsequent digital recording of it, so just replayed the tracks a few times and got multiple examples, and cut them together to make a relatively cohesive whole. So in total, I'd say about six hours.

dazzlaa · 21 Mar 2017 at 09:58

hughtrimble said:
It was painful at first, having spent a couple of hours manually tweaking the speed of little sections to get the tempo and pitch right, so that it actually fit with the rest of the track! But then came the parts where there were gradual changes in pitch due to the recording's slowing down, which meant making incremental adjustments for tiny sections to get it all sounding 'right', and that's when I gave up and asked on here.

Then tried re-recording to see if that would make a difference, and it revealed that much of the problem was down to the tape player itself, varying the speed of the playback and subsequent digital recording of it, so just replayed the tracks a few times and got multiple examples, and cut them together to make a relatively cohesive whole. So in total, I'd say about six hours.

Well done man, that is a great outcome and what sounds like a clever way of solving the problem