Help needed to fix drum track in Audacity

[hardlock]

Sorry to be a bother but I've got an pretty-much irreplaceable drum track that got recorded with the bass drum clipping. Sounds like it's farting actually it's so bad. I tried a number of repairs with little results. Normalize, volume normalize, with "clip fix" having some rounding effect after running twice, but the wave hits still look very squared off. Compressor maybe? I'm lost at this point. Thanks for any tips!

[Farrell Jackson]

You could try using the Audacity low pass filter on just the kick. You would have to highlight the square waves of each kick, repeating the process manually. It would be time consuming but that might allow you to salvage the drum track. The kick will suffer some but once you completed the process you could compress the entire track, using the compress based on peaks setting, which would bring back the overall kick sound some.

I tried it on your sample and it did improve the farting sound some. I set the low pass filter at 100hz with -6db. That may not be the optimum settings but you could experiment with different setting and maybe get better results. Attached is the sample I did.

[hardlock]

Hi Farrell, thanks for this. I hear a big difference but since I can't filter just a kick track, editing each hit would take days (it's a long song...) This does get me thinking of some possibilities and lots to experiment with - Thanks much!

[Zoltan]

A drum replacement plugin might be worth a try. There are free ones.

[hardlock]

I was hoping for a function to "find and replace" like used in word processing and graphics editing. Maybe that's what you're talking about with "drum replacement plugin"? Will look into it, thanks!

I'm still using Audacity v2.4.2 since I'm running win7 but hear that the new v3xxx versions have lots of new features. Not sure I can run it however.

[T.C. Elliott]

If you want to go the 'buy more plugins you might not use much' route then I hear the Izotope RX9 plugin is decent at audio repair including clipping and noise removal. There's a sale for the entry level versions of like 15 plugins for about 50 bucks going on now: Izotope Sale  Just remember that Izotope has different levels with expanded capabilities. It seems they try to get you in with the cheaper options and then lure you into high priced versions for better performance.

Here is the information for RX9: RX9

I've not used it and there is only so much any of theses types of plugins can do but it might be worth a try. I'm not sure if there is a trial period. If so then that might be perfect for you.

Also, I have an older computer and some Izotope plugins have not worked well on my system.