Did the makers of this site ever consider cooperating with e.g. freesound.org? A simple "city" search returns 13000 recordings. E.g. this one (https://freesound.org/people/Yuval/sounds/197759/) is really good.
* goes to create an acct *
Hah! Apparently I made an account 9 years ago, excited to see if it's useful to me now. :D
I used it to clean up some old police training videos with narration by Jack Webb on YouTube. Didn't tag the video with the software, something I normally do.
The software was better than Adobe and audacity. I'd like to find it because I want to 'fix' the audio on quite a few Old Time Radio Researchers titles.
I love this project idea! I don't want to oversell myself, I "do things" not nearly as much as I'd like or should (or used to).... more like "I study, research, fool around with equations, tend to know a lot about, &c". ;-)
But yeah, noise removal is in there! Other forms of restoration too.
_Ideally_ if you can somehow remember what the program you used was, it's possible for me to poke and see which approach they're using. But, assuming that knowledge is lost to the wind, can you link me to the recordings? Ideally a few "before and after". That way I can load them into MATLAB and start to see what's up.
Adobe's Audition is pretty good, iZotope RX is also well loved.
EDIT: Either way, and even if I don't end up doing anything with it, I'd love a link to the recordings. Dirty and clean.
My first pass and first use of the software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xazubVJ0jz4
For general grunge removal, that's best done by cleaning the record as best you can; heavy post processing tends to screw it up. Learning Izotope is on my list of projects.
Java app. Real simple. Now I need to recall what it was... but for time frame, it was around 2005.
Not that you asked but, for transient clicks and pops, a Compressed Sensing (badass new (past 2 decades) applied mathematics) based approach I expect would far outperform anything previous. (Previous approaches used higher order statistics, linear prediction, median cut"ish" things, filtering IIRC.)
I wonder if any of the commercial shops have made CS based impulse noise removal based plugins. I wonder if anyone would pay $$$ for it.