I have to restore an audio track which has background noise and is too low in volume. Should I first raise the volume then remove the noise or the reverse...or does it even matter?

Would be interesting to hear of any other other general agreed upon rules when it comes to order of operations, how to chain plugins for common tasks...
Thx!

 

If you mean by 'raise the volume' compressing and/or limiting, then of course denoise first because the 'SNR' is bigger. Means the level difference between the content and the background noise is bigger than after compressing/limiting.

 

I'm not sure what I mean . I just have a conversation that was recorded too low and I notice that when I just raise the volume to hear it better, I get a lot of room noise along with it. So I just want to raise the perceived volume to a 'normal' listening level and without the noise.
So compression? Limiting? Whatever it takes really . I was going to try all this in Izotope RX

 

I'd say denoise first

 

I normalize the file ( (0 dBFS to hear the noise) remove the noise and then "normalize" it to a value I like between -12 to -18 for further processing. Compression, eq etc ...

 

As far as the denoising goes..

Izotope RX is great stuff,
but I'd also recommend Waves X-Noise and Z-Noise, they are some of the best I've ever tried.

 

Err, the listening level depends on your sound card.

This

could be difficult but at least you could lower it.

So yes, first denoise so you still have better options to compress it afterwards - if you want that.