How to improve a voice recording? Help please anyone?

I was able to record some conversation between my wife and a prospective new 'friend' while he was giving her a massage. However the audio is just poor enough that I can't make out many of the words being said, and sometimes even entire sentences are not easy to make out. I know that making it all good enough to hear is not likely, but does anyone have tips, tricks, or software advice to clean up the voices on the recording to make them stand out more clearly?
Thank you for any help on this!
JK

This is can be tricky. It's a lot harder to clean up audio than it is to clean up pics, or even video. There are dozens of apps out there you can use, but I use Adobe Audition. Basically you want to try to do three things. 1) Trim the audio clip down to just the relevant parts. 2) Increase the gain or input volume of the audio so it's easier to hear the voices and sounds. 3) Filter out the noise that's obscuring the audio. That last part is hard, because oftentimes its very difficult to isolate the noise and remove it without affecting the voices you still want to hear.

Let me know if you'd like me to take a stab at it. I would be discreet with the file. Just send me a msg.

-L2WH ;)

I agree with everything that was said above. But I would suggest you download Audacity, which is a free and open source audio editor. The learning curve is steep but worth it. You won't find a lot of help included with the program, but use Google as your manual. Simply search something like, "How do I increase the gain in Audacity?" and you'll find helpful articles online.

The best way to remove a background noise, say a washing machine, is to find a place on the clip where that is the only sound and highlight a snippet of it. Then when you use the tool to remove that sound, very little else should go with it. If the result obscures the conversation, you can undo the change before saving. Good luck.

BTW, you can use Audacity to capture any audio playing on your computer by selecting your soundcard as the input source. This means you can capture music from YouTube videos. Much quicker and easier than trying to download MP3's.