Need to clean up voice recordings for Custody Case!

Midnyte wrote on 8/22/2008, 10:27 AM

I have some voice recordings that are going to be used in a court case. In a couple of them you can barely hear the other person talking. I was wondering if you can use Audio Cleaning 14 to edit sections of a recording to make that section louder. If so, can someone help me with how to do it? If not, can someone please let me know what software I can use? Thanks!

Comments

feluraunt wrote on 8/22/2008, 12:48 PM

You can use the Audio Cleaning Lab to enhance the audio from the recording... but, you might want to check to see if that would be considered tampering.

I know that Law Enforcement uses Audio Cleaning Lab for these sorts of cleanings and enhancements but I am not sure how that would relate to admissibility in court.

http://www.magix.info/community/link?media=AE0E6FE0707111DDAFC988202B2466CC&quality=original

Let us assume that you are going to do this regardless. The cleaning is not that difficult, but it requires you to know some terminology that you might not be familiar with. For voice recordings not done in a studio, you will have something called air noise (this is where the actual air from the room is being picked up by the microphone) to help eliminate this, the Audio Cleaning Lab has something called noise print. This is a feature that allows you to use a sample of the recording to be reintroduced into the recording and reducing or eliminating the sound from the sample ... confused yet?

Let me put it this way. Imagine this string of characters is the recorded audio:

AAADFAAAGHAAABNHERTAAATTOAAA

If we use the Noise Print feature to sample "A" and add that process back into the recording it would effectually do something such as:

aaaDFaaaGHaaaBNHERTaaaTTOaaa

Now, you visually can see the "A" is there still, but it's characteristics are reduced and in some cases eliminated. This is still very limited and in the case of legality, it might be considered as tampered.

Now, on top of that, you can increase the volume levels of the parts of the recording that contain the actual desired elements. This would be using the music editor to highlight the part of the visual audio recording sample and increasing the amplitude of that highlighted area.

I am pretty sure support can walk you through that, but if you get the product and have questions, maybe we can get that walk through with more pictures and step-by-step information. I think the first thing you need to find out is if it is legal to process this yourself or does it need to be done by law enforcement to be admissible.