Hi, Mike Levine here. I just saw a brand-new, very impressive audio restoration program from iZotope called RX. Designed to deal with broadband noise, hum, clicks, pops, distortion, and more, it has a range of audio-restoration features including a spectrogram view that really lets you zero in on specific parts of complex sounds and edit them. For example, in the demo, a brake-squealing sound was removed from the background of an interview without affecting the dialog. The iZotope folks also demonstrated a clipped waveform that was reduced and rebuilt, with RX figuring out what the waveshapes would have been had it not clipped.

RX is currently a standalone application, but it will soon be available as a plug-in in multiple formats.