Some Improvements

I'm glad to announce that after a week long ban, I'm allowed to use Pixeldrain for download links again. So I just updated all the links I'd posted in the last week. I'm very happy about that, because I find the Pixeldrain links to be better than the BestFile ones.

Also, recently, I've been taking advantage of the MVSEP program's "denoise" filter. It used to be the only way to get rid of hiss was with an audio editing filter called "noise reduction." But this is a crude technique, and it often got rid of music along with hiss, so I had a rule to only use it on talking tracks. However, thanks to improved AI-based technology, the denoise filter works much better. 

Let me show an example. This is a screenshot of the Audacity program, where I do most of my music editing. It's a song by the band Glass Menagerie. I took the screenshot after using the denoise function to split the song into noise, at the bottom, and everything else. You can see there's a fair amount down there. Once I split it like this, all I have to do is delete that track, and save the rest. It's easy, and it makes a huge difference on songs like this one that had lots of hiss. This example was chosen more or less at random. For some songs, the hiss level is much greater.

So, using this technique, I made improvements to the following albums.

Glass Menagerie - BBC Sessions (1968-1969) 

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2025/03/glass-menagerie-bbc-sessions-1968-1969.html

Tracy Chapman - WMFO Studio, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 1-2-1984

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/11/tracy-chapman-wmfo-studio-tufts.html 

Fairport Convention - Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9-13-1968 

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/11/fairport-convention-concertgebouw.html

Derek & the Dominos - Marquee Club, London, Britain, 8-11-1970 

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/11/derek-dominos-marquee-club-london.html

Joni Mitchell - Eastern Rain - Non-Album Tracks (1966-1967) 

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2021/02/joni-mitchell-eastern-rain-various.html

Lucinda Williams - McCabe's Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, CA, August 9, 1991 

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/05/lucinda-williams-mccabes-guitar-shop.html

Dusty Springfield - On TV and Radio, Volume 1: 1964-1966

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/05/dusty-springfield-on-tv-and-radio-1964.html

So if you like any of those albums, I recommend you redownload them. They sound better now. For the Joni Mitchell, Glass Menagerie, and Dusty Springfield ones, just a handful of songs needed improvement. And with Springfield, I still want to work through her other "On TV and Radio" albums. I'm sure there's more hiss there too.

Furthermore, an alert commenter noted that about six minutes was somehow missing to this album. I don't know what happened there, but it's fixed now. 

Donald Byrd - A New Perspective (On a New Perspective) (1964) (A Mike Solof guest post)

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2025/09/donald-byrd-new-perspective-on-new.html

Getting back to the hiss issue, I found the above albums to fix by searching my blog for the word "hiss" and seeing which of the albums that came up still needed improvement with that. But I'm sure there are many more that could be improved this way. I don't have time to go back and relisten to the thousands of albums I've posted to figure this out. So if you can think of albums I've posted with hiss problems, let me know, and I'll check to see if they can also be improved. Once I post an album here, I want to make sure it's presented with the best sound quality possible, even if that means more work to fix things. Thanks.