De-clipping Adele - was I wrong? 

It’s perfectly valid for anyone to say they would do different settings here, and also perfectly valid to say “leave it as is, we don’t care”. But there’s no validity in arguing for any actual artistic merit in this distortion because it is not the result of artistic choice. Unless Adele’s mic technique is so good she chose on the spot to dial in this clipping :)

This really went from painfully unlistenable and my girlfriend would yell at me to turn it down, to completely fine. Really interesting to see these tools in action by someone adept at using them!

Yes, you fixed it. Arguing that the original is in any way better is just dishonest. In a way, the cleaned version is MORE "authentic" as Adele's intention was certainly not to record a distorted mess. Besides, the original still exists for all to hear and recoil from.

I'll put it this way - your de-clipped version didn't have me throw my headphones off in horror and disgust, so it's quite the improvement. I don't know what the people mixing the original were thinking, but I can't stand this clipped shriek. It's genuinely painful to hear. Granted, there's only so much you can do with this sort of source material, but I feel this was a job well done.

I definitely prefer to remove distractions that take me out of the performance, but only in a way that is not itself distracting. The little bit of distortion that remained in your version subtly works to emphasize the amazing power of Adele's voice, without hurting my ears. Thank you for the great demonstration of this tool!

This reminds me of the attitude when it comes to film restoration. The goal is to have a nice clean image and that is true to the original. But sometimes the sources can only give you so much. Furthermore, you can get to a point where you can ruin it by trying correct everything. While it’s not always clear, the aim should be having as a few distractions as possible.

Izotope RX is pure magic

absolutely amazing cleanup, i enjoy seeing how you use rx to process the audio. Much more listenable by the end, the original is...painful. Fantastic insight here, thank you for the video.

This came out great! Definitely a solid technique for mixing and engineering less than stellar source files. I still stand by my opinion that this isn't totally necessary because it was just a laptop video for promo, and I feel like the original still holds merit. But this is unarguably easier to listen to (so maybe something her team should keep in mind for the future).

I think this is an excellent teaching opportunity and discussion. I personally love the performance Adele gives here and love that she feels comfortable to just throw a video like this on RU-vid. I’ve seen lots of artists post voice memos as promo material and it’s an excellent tool for engagement; this video hits that same part of my brain, as a fan: “Wow, Adele sounds amazing even while lounging on a couch!”. That said, I have trouble with the distortion as well. I’d probably watch the video once, show it to some friends (“How is she so talented?!) and then hope she records it with a better setup in the future. Ha! But I love that you’ve shown how to clean up audio like this. I’ve gotten more than a handful of iPhone recordings as a mixer/mastering engineer that I’ve been expected to “fix” (usually because of damaged source files or Covid restrictions hindering access to better equipment). Your advice here is super helpful as both a technical tutorial and as a basis for facilitating conversations on “fixing” in mixing/mastering. Cheers!

Great job. I have no problem with doing this kind of cleanup because the distortion was not intended by the artists.

Very interesting, Ian. What amazes me is how an artist like Adele can do that and go with it. I mean, I am an audio engineer, but my wife came when I was watching this video and she said “why the fuck does Adele sound so bad?”. I mean, she likes Adele but she doesn’t even listen to music so often. I then showed to her what you did to restore it and she went like “and why didn’t Adele do it in the first place? It’s so much better”. That was fun. Thank you!

its amazing the tech we have now! Thank you for the video.

Thanks! Always nice to learn new things about RX. I agree with all your choices except the second after 5min and 56 seconds (timecode 15:53). The high frequency gritty distortion during really causes me pain. The physical reaction is actually so great that I do not even hear the subharmonic problems during that second: the higher frequency simply completely masks it. Guess this is a part of the subjective nature of this kind of work!

The clipped distorted audio almost certainly wasn't an artistic choice, so fixing it made sense.

Capturing "the moment" is of course a precious thing... but I would think that most artists, if they could go back in time and capture that moment at higher quality, they would do so. There are of course artists that seek out lo-fi distortions as part of their sound, but that's a different argument. As an engineer.... I simply see this as a "problem that needs fixing" to make a final product sound better.

Trying to argue that the original is closer to the artistic intent is lost on me. Ideally we would be in her room listening to the live performance, and the tools used in this video brought us closer to that ideal.

I'm not a fan of Adele at all (too much whining and wailing), but you did a good job here. That software is like witchcraft - when used with the right ears and know-how of course. Well done!

Yes, 100% correct to remove that distortion. I really do believe that there are a good few people out there who have lost their critical listening abilities. It's a shame. I hope Adele has not.

You can have great results by using an iPhone and a external microphone, if you know what you you doing. A few months ago I mixed a song where an acoustic guitar appeared recorded in Atlanta the night before and got mixed in LA. 24bit and 48Khz like the rest of the tracks. I love progress and the internet. But if this has done by herself, it's time to learn her a few basics about recording audio. Maybe with a small interface and a decent microphone. With a better end product? a win win without to use plugins to repair her vocals.

Definitely not Ian. I know your goal is to make the music the best it can be and do no harm. Personally I couldn't stand the original distorted section - it was painful. This video is part of Adele's amazing journey and so is part of music history. As such I think her amazing performance should be preserved in the best possible manner without destroying the performance. I think you achieved that. I would love to have heard the conversation between Adele and the mastering engineer for this video :-)

Very good and interesting. I am willing to do this to many recent albums that got this annoying clipping distortion, such as the album Utopia by Bjork.

Bless you!

A bit unrelated advice, but if someone will be inspired to use declipping on material that is just very slightly clipped, declipper can do more harm than good on settings that are even just a little bit not fitting. Listen very carefully to articulation and dynamics of the voice before and after using this tool

I personally cringe at the distortion, both in the first and improved versions. The distortion is not part of her voice at all, and doesn't feel authentic to me. Rather it sounds artificial. You did a good job of reducing much of it. I would have personally gone farther.

Well, this almost tempted me to upgrade to RX9 advanced. ALMOST... Lol. That Deconstruct tool looks pretty handy!

Thanks, Ian but OUCH. ;)

I am really impressed by what you did and by the results, this is really amazing, I didn't know that we could do that much to remove distortion in music, thanks for sharing your great knowledge ! 😀🙏. Regarding the "is it better or not better", if I think like an engineer or audiophile, then your version is, to me, absolutely better. Let say that there are 1% or 2% of people "like us" 😂😂😂, I guess this process could please 1% or 2% more people than the original haha, and the 98% or 99% other people may just "don't care at all", but I'm just blindly throwing numbers here from my little experience in music on the social media.... Maybe some additional EQ and light compression could be added after your processing to bring back some little lost power in the vocals to make the results even "more perfect and impressive" (but I know at some points we have to stop haha). Although I am not a fan of it, there is that relatively new trend on the social media about live phone recordings which I will formulate in the words "we don't care about the music's quality but rather about the artist and its authenticity", but again, this is just what I see all over the place and not my point of view. There are singers ("social media artists") on RU-vid who only record from their cell phone with very average quality, no sound editing, and they have millions of subscribers and millions of views on their videos and almost only positive comments. Others will record perfect sound and incredible video clips and they barely get a few hundreds of views per videos and can barely reach 1k subscribers after years on the social media. And others will record perfect sound and videos and also get millions of subscribers and views so, what really attracts the fans, that's hard to clearly say and every context is different too. Most artists that I know or work with prefer to release their stuff unedited when it's from their cell phone but for sure they care a lot about the quality when it's about singles and albums. And another reality of this modern era is that most people listen to music on the social media from the speaker of their cell phone or from cheap earbuds in noisy environments like in the bus or in the train, so they don't pay attention to these details. They also listen to each live performance only one time, maybe 2, then it's gone and in the garbage trash forever, contrary to many years ago when people were listening hundreds of times to each performance and were paying attention to every subtle detail in the sound. These kind of live recordings in 2021 are intended to be quick and throwable stuff by most artists (although it remains on the channel or Instagram page, most people won't listen to it again after the first time so they won't judge severely). These quick releases create "movement" on the social media page, which is just good for the social media algorithms. But I repeat it, I am not a fan of this philosophy, but I can clearly perceive that it's everywhere like this now. If I was Adele and knowing the traffic that she gets, I would send you my cell phone recording and would possibly choose your version or a further fined-tuned version with subtle final EQ for example.

This would have been fascinating had I not had to stop watching because, distorted or not, it’s just an atrocious bit of singing.

I wonder - maybe another way to deal with this is might be not to get rid of distortion, but to try to make it more pleasant, for example by modifying the overtones so they follow the harmony, or sound more analog.

Mate its all good I don't think you need to agonize over the ethics just show us how you did it.

How much of this type of work could you do with Reaper's spectral editing features?

Her voice sounds like call to prayer through the tannoy.

about 4:40: you said it yourself. it's from a file ripped off youtube. so yeah, i'd say this is pure digital clipping + the youtube encoder. when exporting audio for web uploads it is common knowledge that one should always have the highest peak at less or equal -1db exactly for this reason. peaks can just appear quite randomly due to this perculiar kind of interpolation. i personally assume that adele originally recorded this without clipping, but then some editor realized that she wasn't in tune at some of these notes, because that's definitely true, but melodyne would sound too obvious with the piano and room noise all over the place, so they had to take a different solution. the only other things that can distract from wrong pitch are reverbs and distortion, but not one would like to hear an adele ballad with tons of reverb, so clipping distortion is the best solution. you can just say it was not on purpose and kind of happened in the moment at the end and it will also nostalgically trigger all the kids who ever made some recordings of concerts with their phone. the end result is not a sound that is supposed to sound good, but just to remind people of good times

Painful video to listen to Lol but well articulated. 👍

The distortion was not intentional IMO. When Adele is no longer around; everything she did will be cleaned up I guarantee. If I was able to hear a Bach concert, I would want to hear it clean. It's musical history.

I'm guessing she owns a Macbook. Maybe someone should show her how to adjust input levels?

The original is utterly awful, and while your attempt to clean the mess resulted in it being less offensive, it's still awful. i have no idea how anyone can say that this type of distortion is natural, authentic, or in any way artistic tasteful. The appropriate course of action for such audio is hitting the delete key.

Those darn clippers. We got the right to hear what we want. RU-vidrs are too loud. You tell them and they just ignore.

To be honest, the recording doesn't do much for me in the first place. Maybe because I'm not a huge fan. (I do appreciate her talent.) The room sound is not pleasant. The piano is barely audible, at times. The mic, even when not clipping, does not capture her voice well. I guess I'm old school and think the goal of recording is to capture the performance as transparently as possible. Any artifacts, distortion, or other effects, especially accidentally introduced, take away from it all. The value of such archival recordings are for historical interest, I guess. Much like the Beatles "Get Back" documentary. But it's near impossible to predict what nugget of an archive will be valuable in the future and to what audience.

This passes for music today?

Not wrong!

While I really dislike the clipping distortion of the original to me it still sounds more natural than the swirly artifacts rx introduces

You got paid to de-clipp?

I'm not sure there is any rescuing that performance.

Adele seems to be the Beyoncé of the UK :))) you can't say anything (even constructive things like in this video) about her :))))) The "holy cow of Europe" :))))

I simply would not listen to a track that distorted, no matter who was singing. The distortion brings no pleasure to my ears. Adele did no justice to her talent by releasing such badly produced audio. I would have to have a personal connection (or serious profit potential) for me to listen to that over and over to fix it.

Sounds like she's in pain!

ilike not Adele She Screaming and Horror

It didn’t help her

or just hit mute :)