GoPro Audio Problem - Any way to restore

browj2 wrote on 1/9/2025, 2:47 PM

Hi,

I have a problem with the audio part of a video file recorded on a GoPro Hero 5. This happens occasionally. All other recordings of the day, about 2 dozen, were fine.

I can hear the sound very faintly, but the waveform shows that there is audio and it looks fairly normal, and the meter shows audio during playback. Here is what I see in VPX16:

Opening the file in Sound Forge Audio Cleaning Lab 4 gives:

so the left channel is fainter than the right channel, but the meter shows sound.

The image below exposes the problem. There is a narrow band between 10 and 15 kHz that seems to be loud, even though I can't hear it well in that frequency range. The spectral display shows that there is other information below 10 kHz of much lower intensity.

Here is the display in Sound Forge Pro 16:

and with the Spectroscope turned on:

where you can see the narrow band at high intensity.

Here is the display in SpectraLayers Pro 11:

If I increase the volume by 30 dB, you can see the lower intensity information:

I made a first run removing the information in the 10-15 kHz band. The result was an improvement, but not satisfactory.

Is there another way to do this to try to get back some kind of reasonable audio?

Here is a link to the file in Magix Hub Explorer. I don't know if the file can be downloaded. First time I've used this. If not, I'll upload it to another share site.

Thanks,

John CB

Comments

browj2 wrote on 1/9/2025, 2:59 PM

As a follow up, I tried using MDynamicEq and got an improvement. I removed the high frequencies and increased the volume on the audio object. So maybe there is some better combination in SpectraLayers.

John CB

SP. wrote on 1/9/2025, 6:51 PM

@browj2 Sounds like most of the full sound spectrum got squished/transposed into the frequencies above 10 kHz. I also tried to remove everything above 10 kHz but the remaining rest sounds thin and has many digital artifacts.

Now it would be very cool if SpectraLayers or other tools like RX could stretch the spectrum image with the audio information between 10 kHz - 15 kHz back out to 25 Hz - 20 kHz. But to my knowledge that's not possible?

Sadly, a tool like Photosounder, which can export and import sound images, is bound to the maximum resolution of image formats. So there are not enough pixels to get a useful result after stretching and reimporting the image.