I first reviewed Magic Audio Cleaner some years ago when writing for a print computer magazine. At the time one of the biggest uses for audio editing programs was cleaning up “pops” and “clicks” from recordings taken from vinyl records (remember those?), and Audio Cleaner did the job superbly.

The world has moved on somewhat since then, with the explosion of podcasting and YouTube videos, so I was curious to see how Audio Cleaner, now in its 15th incarnation, had developed in the past few years.

The good news is that an already slick product has become even slicker, and surprisingly, also easier to use.

Click on screenshot for more detail

I had the opportunity to use Magic Audio Cleaner in a real-world application. Recently BLORGE has started experimenting with producing short videos

One of main problems with the first batch of videos is that we used a Canon MV500i video camera, which suffers from a very annoying and distracting “tape noise”. So, using Ulead VideoStudio, I stripped the audio track from the video, and saved it as a WAV file, and loaded it into Audio Cleaner.

The sound file appears onscreen as a wave, and below it a number of functions are shown: Import, Cleaning, Mastering and Export.

Import allows you to load in audio files (including WAV and MP3), record from record player, or rip tracks from a CD.

Cleaning allows you to very easily clean up clicks, crackles, clips, noise and hisses.

Mastering allows you to refine a piece of audio with functions such as StereoFX,Equalizer, Brilliance, Engergizer, Sound Cloner, Dynamics, Multimax and Chorus.

Export allows you to create audio CDs, audio DVDs, CDs and Podcasts, and also allows you to save audio files in all the common formats.

A panel to the right of these functions provides context-relevant help on what the functions do, and how to use them. This makes it very easy for beginners to get started.

If you really want to get your hands dirty, there’s also an editor that allows you to do more advanced manipulation of your audio, where you can cut and paste, insert silence, and that kind of thing.

Back to my BLORGE video, to remove the annoying noise from the audio track, I simply selected the “Denoiser” form the “Cleaning” panel, and then loaded the “Camera Canon MV5i” noise sample (clearly, the noise issue is an established problem – there were also samples for other Canon cameras, as well as Grundig, Sony amd JVC cameras). Most of the noise from the audio was then automatically removed. I then tinkered with the noise level and reduction knobs to improve the result. Once I was happy, I saved the edited audio as a WAV file and inserted it back into Video Studio.

While the resulting audio wasn’t perfect, it was much, much better, and saved a video that would have otherwise had to be reshot.

Audio Cleaner is very easy to use, and does a great job. If you need (or want) to play around with audio, Magix Audio Cleaner will get the job done.

Magix Audio Cleaner 15 requires Windows XP or Vista, a 1 GHz processor, and 512 MB RAM. Recommended retail price is 29.99 UK pounds and AUS$99.95. At this stage, it does not appear to have been released in the US.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 9:05 am under Music, Reviews, Software.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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