removing white noise

[authorblues]

i have a song file with a considerable [read: obnoxious] amount of white noise, could someone either tell me the easiest (free) program i can download to fix this, or could i send the file to someone to optimize it?

thanks for any help.

[Khuskan]

Depends what you mean by 'obnoxious' and how prominent the noise is when instruments are playing. If its just static where there should be silence, most audio editing things (i think audicity included) have a sort of noise gate that cuts off sounds that are too quiet, then smooths off the edges. It's effective, but you'd probably be better off with hardware EAX noise reduction, but that can only be done on certain sound cards, and it can leave a sort of 'metalic' sound.

[jobelow]

coolEdit 96 has software noise reduction pretty much identical to eax. you can take a sample of pretty much anything, use it as a noise profile, and it will filter the frequencies in that sample out of whatever you're using nr on. so you could just use a silent portion of your song that just has the noise as a profile. it also leaves a metallic noise as it cuts out bridge frequencies though, so you gotta be careful with it.