Retouch 4™

The science of eliminating coughs, scuffs, page turns, creaky piano pedals, and even car horns

The Problem

Until now, audio restoration systems have been limited as to the types of noises that they can remove: clicks and scratches, crackle and buzz, pops and thumps. There was nothing that allowed you to identify and eliminate sounds as varied as coughs, record scuffs, squeaky chairs, page turns, the creak of a piano pedal, or such things as car horns. Nonetheless, some engineers have attempted to use techniques such as severe EQ which, in addition to being completely inappropriate to such short duration problems, introduces ringing. Retouch does not suffer from this type of side effect. Others have used (and misused) harsh compression, tight editing, and signal interpolators that affect the whole frequency spectrum. These damage good signal that should be left untouched, and can introduce unwanted side-effects such as drop-outs.

The solution

CEDAR Retouch 4 is a huge leap forward in sound processing technology. Unlike conventional restoration tools, it provides a wide range of time/frequency editing (TFE™) capabilities, and allows you to define the temporal and spectral content of the sound you want to remove. Furthermore, you are not limited to simple 'rectangular' definitions of complex sounds: Retouch 4 allows you to mark complex areas in its spectrogram using the types of tools commonly found in the most powerful photographic and image manipulation software. This makes it possible - accurately and correctly - to identify noises as varied as coughs, squeaky chairs, page turns, the creak of a piano pedal, and even those car horns. Once identified, unwanted sounds are replaced seamlessly with audio that matches the surrounding signal. All other audio remains untouched.

Retouch 4 is only available for CEDAR Cambridge v4, operating at high sample rates, and offering 64-bit internal resolution. It offers an improved and more configurable spectrogram display, the ability to load and process unlimited file lengths, advanced transport capabilities, time markers, and many other improvements over previous versions of Retouch.

In photography, "retouching" is the art of identifying and removing unwanted blemishes from a picture to produce a perfect image. CEDAR Retouch 4 brings this concept into the audio world, allowing you to remove unwanted acoustic events from a signal.

When all else fails... Retouch 4 gives you complete control.