Clean!? Friendly? NO! (Clean! 2)

Member Name: FraserP

Product:	Clean! 2
Date:	18/08/01 (120 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: unique ability, powerful software features

Disadvantages: "Flaky" software, needs powerful system, unfriendly

A must have, according to the Sunday Times "Doors" magazine. Like a fool, rushed out and ordered it.

This kit, which is part a CD software tool and part a nifty little pre amplifier for your record deck, is aimed at those sad souls like me who have a large collection of records, as LPs, singles etc which are unplayed and gathering dust but still fondly remembered. The idea is that you can first record your LP as a digital copy ("wav" file for the experts) and then either transfer it "as is" to a cd, or clean it up to remove small scratches and dust induced pops. It will also get rid of rumble from old record players, although this is one problem I did not have.

So what do you do? You have a cd with a couple of programs, Clean!2 and Wavelab lite. You install these in the usual way. No probs there. The dinky little pre amplifier is basically a very small amplifier, to make your record deck's output load enough and adjusted for digital extraction. There are just two simple "din" inputs for the leads from the deck, and a single output to plug into your sound card's line in. Can't go too far wrong there, can you? Well like many others, my sound card has about 6 inputs / outputs, poorly labelled, and I have no instruction book, so I had to resort to looking on the net for Creative's manual, down loaded that and found I needed the blue one.

Start Clean! and play your record. I could see the little bar graphs jumping in time with the music, but frustratingly could not hear it!

Now before your say "RTFM", I did read the f***ing manual and it is very short, half in German and half in English. It gives only a vague hint that I should be looking for the audio mixer panel, which is part of the sound card's software. Found it- it has about 10 input controls, and remember, I have no manual for the sound card, so much guesswork, and eventually I find a small butto
n which switches on the relevant input.

I found I could still not hear or record through clean, 4 hours after installing it, and I was ready to commit violence on the Sunday Times hack who recommended this....

Anyway, not lightly thwarted, I pressed on. Idea! what about the other bonus program Wavelab lite? Well blow me, it works! I can hear and record through this. So I record an old favourite record with a load scratch through my favourite track.

You have to mess about getting the recording level just so, as if it goes into the red zone, digital sound recording distorts badly, according the manual. So you run through the track monitoring it and adjust the level to the loudest part. This took about 2 runs through the first track. Later tracks were more or less correct.

So finally, I record the first side. Save the file (which, be warned is very large- say 40 Mb per track- I would allow 500 Mb of disk space at least per album). I did this a track at a time so that I could name each track.

I then imported the file into Clean! Finally, it works and you can fiddle with controls, adjusting the degree of cleaning, until you have the right balance. You can remove pops and crackles quite well, but if you use an aggressive setting, you take the "sparkle" out of the record.

In theory, Clean will then allow you to copy the tracks, cleaned up, onto a CD. Clearly, you need a CR re-writer for this. Mine did not work from Clean!, however. Once again I had to export the tracks to another program for "burning" a CD. I use Nero v5.5, which works well and is highly rated.

Finally, I have a CD copy of the LP album. It works, and produced a fairly good copy. It did not eliminate my bad scratch, but it was toned down, and the quieter pops were eliminated.

In summary, for about £60 on line (Jungle.com) this kit will do something, as far as I know, that nothing else will do. The softw
are is "flaky" in my view, and I am still waiting for the support people to reply to my queries (One week and counting), you need lots of patience and a fair amount of ingenuity, and it will deliver the goods.

It has no help file on the actual programs and what is on the net is more or less useless to answer any of my problems.

You need a fast machine ( at least 350 MHz Pentium II, I would say) plenty of memory, hard disk space, and most of all time and patience. The good news is that you should only need to use it once per record, and maybe I was unlucky. However I have very standard, high specification equipment, 10 or so years experience of PCs and this program takes me way back to the "fun" of configuring DOS system files to boot a new game................

Best Buy? Well as it is the only one to do this job, I guess a poor program with no competition has to be the best!

Summary: