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[ Go to April 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by Marc Spiwak
Snap, crackle and pop are welcome noises in your cereal, but not your sound recordings. DART Pro from Tracer Technologies eliminates those annoying sounds from WAV files and restores your audio clarity. Serious audiophiles will appreciate it more for its reasonable price tag (compared to professional filtering systems) than its average capabilities. I tried it on a sample WAV file of a dusty, scratched record. DART Pro's DeClick feature effectively removed all the clicks and pops in my sample recording, but I had to accept the loss of just a bit of the high-frequency signals. DeHiss removed the hiss, which sounds like the noise heard at the beginning of cassettes, but cost me some of the fidelity of the original. DeNoise removes constant disturbances, such as hums, whines and record-groove distortion, but it was the one effect that wasn't that effective. I had to generate a "noiseprint" of the disturbance, a tough chore. DeNoise analyzed the noiseprint and tried to locate and remove anything similar. If you want to generate a recording, DART Pro lets you record WAV files. The Record mode you choose depends on the number of channels in the source material and the appropriate sampling rate. DART Pro also provides special effects such as scaling, muting, reversing, comparing and mixing, splitting and uniting stereo channels, filtering, equalizing and spectral analysis. If audio is your hobby, or if you need a simple, low-cost tool to improve a small number of digital recordings, then you will find a use for DART Pro. But its simple cleaning capabilities won't replace professional audio tools.
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