Sunday, January 11, 2009

A little experiment...

During the festive period, I've been experimenting on cleaning up the audio on a couple of cartoons using the open-source program Audacity (I know there are better, more sophisticated programs out there, but due to this credit crunch, I decided to restrict myself to free software). The first cartoon to get this treatment is the 1929 Aesop's Fable Wood Choppers, where my copy has a rather crackly audio. I managed to clean it up using a minimum amount of noise reduction, and in my opinion, the end result is adequate, if not great:



Krazy Kat's Alaskan Knights proved to be more troublesome. Bootleg-print aside, this one not only has a crackly audio, but it's also very faint and has a lot of background hiss. Minimum noise-reduction and low-pass filtering made it more audiable, but despite boosting the audio as well, it still comes out as quite faint, See what you think of it: