Can this distortion be reduced enough to make speech easily understandable?

Question

Here's a clip; I've got four hours of this in aac demuxed from the video source. Can this sort of distortion be removed in a useful way, leaving understandable speech? And if so, is there a way for a rank amateur to do it with free tools? Doesn't need to be production quality or anything, just easy to listen to and understand.

I see that there's a 10 day free trial of Izotope RX 7; would that be able to do anything good? Seems that the decrackle module that's been discussed here no longer exists?

edit: De-crackle does still exist; and the 10-day free trial does not allow files to be saved after editing

Answer 1

Decrackle still exists, but wouldn't be my go-to for this one.

I had a look at the clip & - with more patience than I have - you can get some intelligibility using Centre Extract, then Deconstruct, with some thump removal on De-Plosive & finally some make-up gain on Leveller.

I got it to 'intelligible but I wouldn't like to have to listen to 4 hours of it'.

Give the free trial a go - I spent 15 mins, you've got 10 days ;)