Still no software to resynthesize lost high frequencies? [SOLVED]

It’s intended for podcasts rather than music, but you might want to check out Adobe Enhance as well (it’s free).
Some of the examples I’ve heard from that have been very impressive.

Did anyone mention this one?

https://www.apulsoft.ch/apunmask/

Its a very interesting plugin.

Gullfoss does a great job of boosting hi-end in a tasteful manner. The trial is free for 14 days, give it a go.

Just found this while looking into cheaper alternatives … this product has something called “Vitalize” which is supposed to do the same, but this Suite is $60, while the Izotope Suite is $1200.

“Vitalize doesn’t boost certain frequencies, but adds harmonics instead. These harmonics are not based on distortion, but are artificially created by a sophisticated algorithm.”

I actually use some Acon stuff already, so I might get this one :wink:

3 Likes

uh oh. look out syntakt, there’s a new falsetto in town.

wrong thread, please head over to The intoxicated hangout

3 Likes

I’ve been using Acoustica for years and it’s a good audio editor. It also has some other restoration effects like de-reverb and noise reduction, which I’ve used creatively as well as for their intended purposes. I love the full suite of effects too.

The only thing that still gets me is how it handles zooming in and out of the waveform, and scrolling. Somehow I can never get used to it!

One of the reasons why I got TAL-DAC was for adding some HF grit and energy back to heavily slowed down samples, the jitter parameter used in small amounts and in combination with other settings can be really nice. But I’m using it more for processing single samples not for remastering old recordings, so it’s probably not what you want at all.

1 Like

I’m curious to hear the material in question now. :grinning:

Is the missing high frequency content unique/exclusive to the missing freqs? Or are all the fundamental freqs present?

I’d guess that whatever ‘is’ there of the missing freqs could be found and cleaned up with Izotope RX10.
Otherwise, one of these new AI stem separators plus something to apply/generate upper harmonics?

lol not sure if weird unsetlling vocalisations “extracted” from instrumental music is what’s required here, but it sure is an interesting result..

3 Likes

Maybe this is the reason exactly, why such thing doesn’t exist - yet.

How should “something” - even us - know, what was there and by what it was generated.

Even some AI would have to make a wild guess :wink:

1 Like

Thanks everyone!

I tried the demo of Acoustica - Vitalize (a low-cost alternative to Izotope Advanced - Spectral Recovery and Izotope Standard - Spectral Denoise), and it does an okay job adding something, so this is a success :wink:

btw., in all of the cases of those recordings, it’s not a complete arrangement, but rather one track of multitracks.

2 Likes

But PLEASE save the orig! I love the BoC tapes. The original release of Nlogax. Mastered version sounds weird.

There’s something I like about shitty tape recordings. but I’m old

6 Likes

As someone who recently investigated and wrote about reconstruction of an analog signal from samples, this was my first impression, but I thought about it a bit, and it’s not quite so simple. Suppose you have a saw wave, whose harmonics drop off in amplitude proportional to the inverse of the multiple of the fundamental frequency. Shave off the top end with a digital filter. Those higher frequencies are gone. But looking at what is left, one can see a pattern (as if I were to say 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, what comes next?) and it’s not unreasonable to extrapolate. Now, doing this in a dynamic setting, probably with multiple voices, is likely quite a challenge, and would require some human intervention to tweak parameters to achieve an acceptable result, but it’s not completely out of the question.

3 Likes

I always keep originals and never delete anything :wink:

My use cases are stuff that was broken before it hit the tape, so tape itself is not really the problem. I actually mentioned cassette or tape only to convey that those recordings are very old. The other mentioned recording (not done by me) sounds way worse and was not stored on tape, but on hard disc :wink:

… I love shitty tape recordings, too :wink:

2 Likes

You seem to agree here to what I said before … if we don’t know what the content was … it’s lost.

I agree, if we know that a violine or a piano was the source, we could add higher frequencies indeed, which would populate the spectrum credible enough.

1 Like

“If we don’t know, we don’t know” is a bit circular. The high frequencies are gone. But we have information from what remains. The creator, recording engineer, or spectator would have further context. And the goal would not be exact recreation but plausible approximation.

1 Like

zynaptiqs unfilter can be used for that task

its an ai driven plugin that can reproduce missing frequencies in a recording or tame wrong eqalizations. it not only works on lost highs but on lost low frequencies as well. but use it with care and especially listen for hidden artifacts (as with all these „magical“ repair tools).

https://www.zynaptiq.com/unfilter/

you can even use this to remaster old recordings from metallica to make them sound less bad :wink:

Absolutly agree :slight_smile:

1 Like

Unfilter doesn’t do that. Did you mean Unchirp?

1 Like