Method and apparatus for reducing noise using a plurality of recording copies

Abstract

The present invention provides a method for reducing noise using a plurality of recording copies. The present invention produces a master file with lower noise than the available recording copies, and avoids the problems of losing musical content caused by prior art pop and click removers. The system comprises a recording playback unit, a computer system with a sound input capability, and a high capacity storage system such as a CD recorder. In operation, a plurality of recording copies of a single recording are played on the playback unit. These recordings are digitized by the computer and a separate recording file is formed for each copy of the recording. The recording files are then synchronized. The samples from each of the recording files are then averaged to reduce the noise components. A variety of threshold comparison techniques can be employed to eliminate samples and/or recording files that are outside of a computed range for that sample based on the values of the master, the other slave files or a combination thereof.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.