removing a certain noise from a wind up duck

oh the utter crap i get up to.

anyway surprisingly i've never had to do this before so wondering if there's some miricle plugin that will do this for me.

i know this sounds absolutely ridiculous but i have this wind up duck that plays the most amazing melody. but of course, along with the melody is the sound of the winding mechanism and i want to get rid of this and just be left with the melody.

i've tried noise removing plugins but they're not really doing the job. any ideas?

let me know or the duck gets it!

:)

There's a function in Audacity which lets you select a wave (i.e. a clean sample of the "noise" you want to remove) and then it tries to remove it from the rest of the sound.

It's a bit hit and miss.

How would you characterise the winding noise? Is it constant or periodic?

You could try sampling just the winding noise, then inverting the wave and mixing it back with the melody + noise... again, would be very hit and miss.

Is there any way you could find a "wind up duck" preset on some synth and just copy the melody?

P.S. You're a lunatic.

Adobe audition's spectral view might be worth a try. The notes should stand out as blobs of pitched stuff against the winding noise...select noise with marquee tool, then apply amplify effect set to minus something db....or alternatively, use the marquee tool to cut the melody out and paste it to a new waveform, leaving the winding noise behind. Really depends on the sample though, if they're mixed together at the same frequency or have overlapping harmonics there may not be much that can be done in that way.

if the melody is produced through a speaker you could wire in an output jack like circuit benders do, or get an electrician/geek to do it.