Correcting Stutter on Audio Track

[RedByrd85]

I have a recording from a wedding that has a stutter placed throughout the entire section involving the handheld mic. The music that is played is smooth and uneffected, but I'm hoping there is some way to clean up or smooth out the dialogue. Does anyone have any tricks or methods to cleaning up or correcting this issue? Sample Audio for testing as WAV file as attached separately.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

Sorry, no. It's like distortion - you can't fix that because you don't have an undistorted reference. With missing and stuttering audio it's no different; you can't create a 'correct' version when what you've got is incomplete.

[RedByrd85]

Yeah I figured it's a bit of a long shot. I'm lucky in that I have several ambient camera mics that have some ok sound on them so I can pair the 2 to make them sound not as bad. The downside is I have lots of competing noises on the camera audio (wedding reception). I would like to fake clean up the stuttering line feed though even just a little. I've tried doubling/tripling the audio and offsetting the 2nd and 3rd duplicate tracks by a few frames. I've even tried a suggestion of adding a reverb and focusing on the wet vs dry. This has some effect but none that I see as a good bandaid just yet. I'm not a pro on audition so if there is any options I could try, I'm open to experimenting with it.

[RedByrd85 · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: After playing around with a few things I found this to be the best solution for the unfixable stutter on my audio. Is it great? No. Does it work well enough and better than doing nothing? Yes.

To repair the audio as best I could, I played with reverb, but ultimately landed on a simple trick of layering the same audio over itself several times and offsetting each by +00:00.01 audio units in an attempt to fill in the dead spaces left by the stutter. I used 3 additional copies of the audio in addition to the original. To further help, I did have an internal mic recording audio on my camera which helps blur the remaining drops a bit more. I tried to clean up this camera audio to see if I could use that instead, but the stutter is audible from that as well and processing only amplifies that.

Here are the original, original plus 3 offset copies, and all 4 copies plus onboard mic for reference. Best not to be in this situation, but if you are, this may not be a bad bandaide.