SOLIPSIUMAlpha
SOLIPSIUM Super-resolution audio engine
VHS and camcorder tapes
Drop the transfer and Solipsium checks its sound for hum and noise, then repairs 20 seconds for you to hear.
Drop a tape transfer here
Solipsium checks it in your browser for clipping, hum and noise, without uploading it. It can then repair 20 seconds for you to hear, with no account.
MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, WAV, MP3 and more, up to five minutes for the check.
Solipsium can still try a repair on 20 seconds.
Drop the same file in the editor with a free account.
What it is
Solipsium repairs noisy or damaged recordings. That includes the sound of a home video, and a video export keeps the picture as it was.
Play the tape in a VCR or the camcorder and record it with a USB video capture device, or ask a transfer service for an MP4. Keep that file as your master.
When your browser can open the file, the check names mains hum, background noise, clipping, dropouts and muffled sound, with their times. Nothing is uploaded for it.
Solipsium's server repairs those 20 seconds of sound and lists a reason for each step. The sound comes back alone, to play against the original.
With a free account, it repairs a video's sound up to 30 minutes at a time, and the export keeps the original picture with the repaired track.
How it is repaired
Suggested repair measures each transfer for both, then treats what it finds.
A player's power supply, or a ground loop between the player and the computer, can put mains hum on a transfer. Solipsium notches out the hum at 50 or 60 Hz and its harmonics. The try lists the reason: “Mains hum was found, so it is notched out before any cleanup.”
Steady tape hiss gets Full-band speech cleanup, a speech model that keeps the voice's full range and lowers what surrounds it.
A dropout on tape is a dip in level with sound still in it, and the gap filler leaves it. Only holes of digital silence up to 100 ms are filled. A glitch in the capture can leave a hole like that.
One is speech that stops under about 5.4 kHz, as a phone line does. The other is sound that stops between about 8.3 and 11 kHz, as a file saved at 16 kHz does. Either rebuild runs only when nothing else was found, or only steady noise, and what it adds is labelled inferred. Any other tape keeps the treble it has.
Questions
Not from this repair, which works on the sound. The old home video page doubles the width and height of a transfer on your graphics chip, in your browser, and keeps its sound.
No. Wow and flutter from an uneven tape speed are not repaired, and the repair does not move sound in time.
Solipsium's free try is built for speech. Where it hears music and no loud noise under the voice, it leaves out speech cleanup and echo reduction, which would remove the music. If it still hears music with the hum notched out, it leaves out the hum notches too, since they would cut into the notes.
In parts. The editor takes up to 30 minutes and 1 GB at a time with a free account. Cut each part out with the video trimmer and repair it on its own.
Not for the check, which runs in your browser. Pressing Repair the first 20 seconds sends those 20 seconds. If your browser could not open the file, or it runs over five minutes, the whole file goes to Solipsium's server instead, so the try is offered for such a file only up to 25 MB. Solipsium keeps only those 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
The picture has its own page, and so do other old tapes.
Double a transfer's width and height.
Hum and hiss on an audio tape.
Stripe hiss and projector hum.
Old voices, from tape or disc.
Every free tool on one page.
The editor repairs the sound of the whole tape, up to 30 minutes at a time, and exports it with the original picture.
Free for a limited time, whole recordings included. No card.
Free account, no card.