You might have a point about tape hiss, but is this going to be dominant over surface noise? Two recordings can be time stretched to the same length in terms of number of samples. The real problem is record eccentricity. Maybe section by section, but it is a hell of a lot of work.
Personally I'd be worried about this level of work and objectivity affecting my love for the piece of music.
Please, just go and spend a few of those painstaking hours work on actually trying either VinylStudio or ClickRepair. Try both. Then offer an opinion, ideally with some examples of badly managed repairs. People who use them care about sound quality and are very happy with results. Me included. They most certainly do not think them beyond awful. Some, not me of course, might be irked by what your remark implies about them.
Everyone has suffered automagic software borking things. A few runs of an autorouter turning a circuit layout into sphagetti could put you off ever using one again. So I don't think there is any need for anyone to feel irk from normal reticence.
I guess, but as a rule I try to avoid offering definitive opinions on something I have no experience of.
Auto-routing is an extremely complex business. There are companies that make their living out of selling graph theory based software. I used the TomSawyer API in a development project a decade and some ago and it was deep and wide, and if you read around the subject you can see why. If you have time, have a rummage on their site. There's also this which I also dabbled with at the same time. It might lend some perspective on those occasional borks...
All the above said, if you're confident enough to offer a product and state that it does a job, dealing with the complexity inherent in it is your responsibility.
De-noise and de-clicking is less complex IMO, and although it's still being researched academically the commercial implementations of de-clicking software are already mature and very capable and deserve better than a 'dismissive wave of the hand'.
The paper I linked to above is really interesting, but the maths is way above my pay grade 🙁
The same researchers also produced a paper on using statistical methods to de-noise LPs. Something I'd wondered about, because looking at the magnified waveform on noisy LPs it just looks like something a program in R should be able to clean up in no time as it's exactly the sort of thing statisticians do with noisy data.
I've actually taken the time to go through the automatic corrections that Vinyl Studio has made to one of my recordings and I've been impressed with the accuracy and sensitivity to the music, particularly transients.
Instead of 2 hours painstaking work, I get excellent results with a recording de-clicked and de-noised, split into tracks, metadata added, and exported as 192/24 flac in around 30 minutes on a reasonable condition LP. I prefer to use moderate sensitivity levels to get the easy stuff out of the way, and then if there's anything left, I edit it by hand. Something Vinyl Studio also supports.
I have plenty of LP's where the space between tracks is noticeably quieter than the recording. In any case this seems like folly, if you are talking used copies of the same LP if one has been damaged by mis-tracking or being in a smokers environment it would probably dominate the process. So now you need to get 3 pristine copies of the same LP.
Well yes, and in reality if the process was viable 3 copies for lowering background noise would not be enough. Popular music around LOG era would have been encoded with Dolby or DBX. The mix output to the mastering machine would have been pretty quiet. If the master was also encoded, I don't know how it compares with a blank grove.
In a comparison of record cleaning methods the ones that involve wiping the surface cause micro scratches, permanently adding noise. A flawed medium. Automated processing methods preserve sanity.
In a comparison of record cleaning methods the ones that involve wiping the surface cause micro scratches, permanently adding noise. A flawed medium. Automated processing methods preserve sanity.
My views exactly. I want good enough from my recordings, not perfection, and much as I like to think I could tell the difference, I know I can't.
I have three copies of Wish You Were Here. Crappy pressings, three attempts over 5 years to get a decent (not perfect) copy, and those three albums represented 9 album exchanges.
There are micro events on every LP, short duration, <80 and are a lot of what're addressed by automated removal systems. I've looked at them in VS and they're clearly very sharp transients most unlikely to be music because at the magnifications needed to see them the waveform isn't that sharp and they really stand out.
I hear a click on headphones, look on the waveform display, zoom in and the area is clearly marked, I can see the original transient and the repair in the same view. Repairs are never out of place compared to the waveform either side of the transient.
Sometimes click is much more in one track than another, when I go to look at the repair I can see it's been corrected in one track and been protected from repair because the software couldn't decide. Protected areas are listed, protection can be removed and a click repaired.
The repairs are automated but you have control.
If this sounds like I'm trying to sell Vinyl Studio, I'm not, but I've been using it for 2+ years and I'm extremely happy with what it does.
The thought of spending 2h+ per disc on the >1000 I have is too terrifying to contemplate....
But my choices are my choices, I'm happy with them, I enjoy listening to the music that results.