Freesound Forums

I might be posting in the wrong forum for this type of stuff but hey ill give it a shot. I have some recordings made from a cellphone, sometimes the phone was in a pocket. There is alot and i mean ALOT of background noise. Alot of the recordings were made in a mechanics shop with music playing. Im trying to hear the voices of people talking in the recordings. Sometimes the music is actually louder than the voices. Is there ANY software I can buy that would be able to help me hear the voices and what they are saying....Ive looked a little but i really know nothing about it all and most of hwat i have found that looks like it could work you have to work in a forensic agency to purchase I think.....any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.....im not too worried about price

thank you

If i were to do something like this, i would use audacity. It has a "noise removal" feature, that works really fine, depending how you use it:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Find a chunk of the noise you want to remove, but without the elements you want to preserve, mark it, activate "noise removal" and click "get noise profile" (i'm sorry, but mine's not in english, so this might not be translated exactly into the right words here). Mark the whole track, and press "noise removal" once again, and press ok. You can edit the properties as you like, until you find the right setting you want.

Thank you! This sounds like just what I need. Will it remove music if it's playing on the radio also?

Short answer, no.
But you will be able to attenuate the frequencies that are unwanted while retaining the vocal frequencies with EQ.
You might want to look here as well.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/rx/index.asp