So my wife made an audio recording as usual with her trusty Olympus digital dictation machine and external Sony mini-boom mike at college. This always results in a pretty decent .wav file which she can refer to afterwards (she happens to be Japanese, and her class is in English). The other day I transferred her recordings as usual, but this time all I could hear was a lot of white noise / "fuzz" and barely audible at the "bottom" of the noise, the lecture. I'd like to know if it would be at all possible to somehow boost the sound so that I can hear what is being said. Our computers are all windows based, and if possible, would like to use free software (due to credit crunch and being broke!) I've googled like hell and got no results, so am probably wording my search wrong, and would be incredibly grateful for a some help as it was a really important class and she missed some bits. Thank you very much for reading.
have a look in the help guides.. it's under "effects">"amplify" .. and also check out the noise removal function.. the swiss army knife of audio freeware. You could hit me up on IRC (see my profile page) and I can see what I can do with the files for you if you like.. I do this kind of work all the time.
Thanks a lot mate, I gave audacity a try, and it *did* raise the volume of the file, thank you for that, but I could not figure out how to separate the white noise. Am by no means a computer newb, but am completely hopeless and clueless on all things audio. I suppose I have seen too many tv shows where the slacker kid working for the cops uses some leet warez and picks out the sfx or voice from some recording and hoped I could do the same... Off to work now, will follow your advice and try and hit you up via irc this week. Thank you again for your kindness...