ABSTRACT
Tape simulators and guitar amp simulators usually take the form of digital plug-ins that can be added to tracks or a bus in Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software. In this chapter, the author uses the freeware Decimate plug-in to let viewers of his AES Audio Myths YouTube video hear how the audio quality of music degrades as the bit-depth is reduced to below 16 bits. Making the Fast Fourier Transform size larger divides the audio into more individual bands, which reduces the noise more effectively. Software noise reduction uses a series of many parallel noise gates, each operating over a very narrow range of frequencies. Software noise reduction works after the fact to remove noise that’s already present in a Wave file. The author also uses Sound Forge to remove vocals in Wave files destructively, but processing the left and right channels on separate tracks of a DAW is usually faster.
