I let a hobby concert project sit for some years because I invested too much time in 'cleaning up' the first track. Hard drive crashed, got a new PC with more horsepower and decided to upgrade to SFAS 15 instead of reinstalling v.10.

I had been manually editing out (waveform graphical editing) handheld mic rustling sounds...prevention would obviously be a better method.

I realized I can only cut that out where it's audible, which is during introductions, etc. Waveform is too complex during music or largely inaudible at those times. So I decided to leave as much of the trash stay as I can tolerate. Just call it a lo-fi recording and don't sweat it too much.

After installing SFAS 15, I gave a listen to one of the unedited files, and wondered why it sounded better than I remembered...in particular, being able to hear an upright bass I was convinced got the short end of the recording. I realized I had probably over-processed in earlier sessions...compressing, normalizing, EQ'ing, not necessarily in that order, and repeatedly.

I hate to fall back on presets (izotope, Sony, whatever was in the package) by trial & error, but doing a minimal amount of that in preview sounded better than previous multiple specific (aggressive) operations...kind of leapfrogs the learning curve.

Tonight I picked up forum advice that if one is going to compress and normalize, do them in that order, and try to avoid making things worse.

Since every recording is unique, and there is no magic processing recipe, are there any new 'intelligent' features developed over the last 5 versions that I should use to learn something about what the software thinks of the audio?

Otherwise, I think less is better. Try to do minimal damage.

Thank you.