What audio repair/restoration software works well on Linux?

[daos]

Izotope RX9
Spectralayers 8 Pro
Acon restoration software
etc

What have you tested and currently does work well natively or using Wine? Thank you!

[d.healey]

Audacity
Gnome wave cleaner - but it very much depends on the material how useful this is
Ocenaudio - non-free

[sunrat]

I use Izotope RX6 but reboot to Windows to use it. The WINE HQ database reports RX5 works but no mention of any versions after that. Nothing in Linux has similar functionality or effectiveness.
Audacity has a noise removal tool which works OK for light to moderate cases. There's also Noise Repellent plugin which I've heard works well but I haven't used it.

[d.healey]

Audacity has a noise removal tool which works OK

It also has spectral editing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5ErzybkrGc

[j_e_f_f_g]

OcenAudio is free, but not open source.

But, it's the only wave editor for Linux that is even remotely useful for finetuned editing of waveforms, as it's the only one that lets you zoom in to see individual sample points in both the time as well as amplitude axis. You must be able to do this if you want to be able to perform accurate edits or set loop points.

P.S. Audacity's noise reduction is awful compared to Adobe Audition's. The former adds all sorts of phase and pitch distortions. Audacity should rename their feature to "noise insertion".

[tavasti]

I use Izotope RX6 but reboot to Windows to use it. The WINE HQ database reports RX5 works but no mention of any versions after that. Nothing in Linux has similar functionality or effectiveness.

I have been told that all Izotope products fail to authorize, and that is also my experience (having some of them). If you find them cracked, they are told to work.

[Loki Harfagr]

Since nobody, yet, did mention this (too complete) gem:
https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

[d.healey]

Since nobody, yet, did mention this (too complete) gem:
https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

Can you edit audio with that? I thought it was just a viewer/analyser.

[Toejam76]

Didn't know about ocenaudio and gave it a try. It's better than Audacity which isn't saying much, but it does this when I tried to remove it:

Code: Select all

sudo apt remove ocenaudio 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED
  ocenaudio
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 1 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
After this operation, 52,1 GB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

A bug? I could remove it with dpkg -r

[sunrat]

Didn't know about ocenaudio and gave it a try. It's better than Audacity which isn't saying much, but it does this when I tried to remove it:

Code: Select all

sudo apt remove ocenaudio 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED
  ocenaudio
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 1 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.
After this operation, 52,1 GB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

A bug? I could remove it with dpkg -r

I got the same weirdness when I removed it IIRC. It was a while ago and I vaguely recall something about it annoyed me. It's not open source either although developed at a university, but it is free as in beer. I don't think it's better than Audacity apart from looking prettier, although neither are a patch on some commercial offerings like Wavelab.

[Loki Harfagr]

Since nobody, yet, did mention this (too complete) gem:
https://www.sonicvisualiser.org/

Can you edit audio with that? I thought it was just a viewer/analyser.

Oops, yes, that's probably exact! I just got carried over by the fact that I used it to see precisely what I'd have to do in elsewhich aux soft to chirurgically repair some blunds; and usually ended up with a re-take or a punch-in which are certainly not feasible when you work on old material, in which cas I used SonicVisualiser as a forensic tool to help me conceive the combo of cuts, EQ and comps/lims I had to prepare to have a chance at it.
Now since it's also somehow a vamp plugin bridge it might be the case that some may be used in an active way and on the other side I wouldn't exactly tell that either Audacity nor Ocenaudio can actually repair soundfiles (but I guess that's another type of discussion even more OT)

[Toejam76]

@sunrat
I should have elobarated what I meant by "better". Audacity in all versions and distros would trigger the input of my usb interface like crazy with a staccato like sound at startup which made me fear something would actually break. It has no preview in the file browser which I kinda need. They also wanted to add telemetry and that's a big no-no for me. Ocenaudio at least has plugin support, but could only load a few AudioDamage plugins like Filterstation2 and Eos.
I do wave editing in Reaper, which is enough for my hobbyist stuff. I've heard that RX9 works, but not the legit version like already mentioned.