Hiss.
Tape hiss within 26 dB of the voice is a steady floor and is cleaned: “A steady noise floor was found, so it is removed.”
SOLIPSIUM Super resolution audio engine
Reel-to-reel
Clean up a reel-to-reel tape after you capture it.
Capture the reel to a file and drop the file here. Solipsium measures its hum, hiss, clipping and gaps before it changes anything.
Drop a captured reel here
Solipsium checks it in your browser for clipping, hum and noise, without uploading it. It can then repair the first 20 seconds for you to hear, with no account.
WAV, MP3, M4A, MP4 and more, up to five minutes for the check.
Your first 20 seconds
After signing up, drop the same file into the editor to repair all of it.
What Solipsium hears
Make a free account to repair the whole recording
Then drop the same file into the editor. Scans and short repairs are free.
Capturing
Speed and tracks first.
Two settings on the deck decide whether the capture sounds right at all. No repair can fix them afterwards.
Play it at the speed it was recorded.
Reels were recorded at 1.875, 3.75, 7.5 or 15 inches a second. The box or the label often says which. At the wrong speed voices sound too high or too low.
Match the track layout.
A quarter-track reel holds two stereo programs, one each way. Capture one direction, then turn the reel over for the other.
Set the level and save a WAV.
Set the level on the loudest passage so it stays under full scale, and save a 16-bit WAV at 44.1 or 48 kHz.
Fault by fault
What a reel brings, and what is repaired.
The try repairs the first 20 seconds on Solipsium's server and lists a reason for each step.
Hum from the deck.
Lines at 50 or 60 Hz and their multiples are notched in bands 3 Hz wide: “Mains hum was found, so it is notched out before any cleanup.”
Dropouts.
A dip in level from worn tape still has sound in it, so the gap filler leaves it. Only holes of exact digital silence, up to 100 ms with sudden edges, are filled: “Short holes of lost audio were found, so they are filled from nearby sound.”
Left as they are.
Wow, flutter and print-through, the faint pre-echo of a loud passage, are not repaired.
Questions
About reel-to-reel tapes.
One side plays backwards.
That is the other direction of a quarter-track or half-track reel captured from the wrong end. Capture it with the reel turned over, or flip the capture with reverse audio.
The voices sound fast or slow.
The capture ran at another speed than the recording. Capture again at the right speed: a repair does not change pitch or speed.
The tape sheds or squeals.
Stop playing it. An old tape that sheds or squeals can be damaged by playback, and is a job for a transfer service before any repair.
A long reel?
The check in your browser reads up to five minutes, and the editor imports up to 30 minutes and 1 GB at a time with a free account. Cut a longer recording into parts with the audio splitter and repair each part.
Is my recording uploaded?
Not for the check, which runs in your browser. Pressing Repair the first 20 seconds sends those 20 seconds; when your browser could not open the file, or it runs over five minutes, the file itself goes to Solipsium's server, so the try is offered for it only up to 25 MB. Solipsium keeps only the first 20 seconds and deletes them within an hour. If you are signed in, a file you drop or choose is uploaded to your account and opens in the editor instead. The privacy notice has the rest.
Free audio tools
Related free tools.
For tapes and long captures.
- Clean up a cassette tape
Capture a cassette and check it for hum, hiss and gaps.
- Reverse audio
Flip a side captured from the wrong end.
- Remove hiss and static
How steady hiss is measured and lowered.
- Audio splitter
Cut a long capture into parts in your browser.
- All free audio tools
Every free tool on one page.
The whole reel.
Make a free account and drop the same capture into the editor to repair all of it, up to 30 minutes at a time.
Repair the whole reel
Free account, no card.