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[Saker]

I'm a dumbass when it comes to music , so i need a little help here 
I've got my hands on some cool old CD set from the early 20th century , , I need these tracks for a project i'm working on , but the problem is that some of these track are fucked up like this one [link] and most of them are like this one [link] 
So , is there any hope to fix them ? , i need 'em just to be ...um ... listenable 
Is there any hope ?

[Paint by Numbers]

These sound... scary.

I don't think you can repair them. You might be able to reduce some of the static, using a free program like Audacity. Never mind, I don't know what I'm talking about. Others will know better.

[pgil]

You might be able to remove some noise from the first one with Audacity...

The second one, though... It's so distorted I don't think there's anything you can do but embrace the noise.

[Craig Stern]

That second track is distorted--no amount of noise removal can fix that. For tracks like the first, one, though, Auduacity's noise removal works pretty well. You just have to select a couple of seconds of silence in the track, tell it to Get Noise Profile, and then apply a noise removal filter to the entire track.

[LemonScented]

My ears might be decieving me, but I think the first one is a bit distorted too. There's noise in there which I guess you could clear up a bit, like Mr. Stern says, but I'd be surprised if it did much except make the distortion more obvious

Are the specific recordings themselves important to the project, or the content of them (music, lyrics, etc)? If it's the former then I'm not sure what you can do except live with them. If it's the latter the only thing I could see working is to find people well-versed enough in the language and musical conventions of the pieces, and try to record some new "cover versions" of them - I daresay even a cheap microphone in a suitably sound-dampened room would end up sounding better.

[sugarbeard]

You can clean them up a bit... but the static is so intense that when you start to cut it you'll only begin to distort the actual track in there more. Audacity has a nice noise reduction, but I use Adobe Audition for noise reduction. Works really really well.

[Craig Stern]

I used to use Cool Edit 2. Then Adobe bought it, renamed it Audition, and jacked up the price on it by a factor of three. So now I use Audacity. Both get the job done--but only one gets it done while factoring in my annoyance at Adobe for buying other peoples' programs and then charging way more for them after making minor changes.

[Zenorf]

Oh my that file is a horrible distorted mess.

I had a quick hack on it for a little while. Sounds better but still crap.
http://www.radiationburn.net/images/basara_poo.mp3

I real sound engineer should be able to do a much better job given some time.

~Audacity is a good tool for it with good noise removal but with a file this distorted it's going to take a long time to get any meaningful results.
My suggestion is to open up two copies and in the first copy start removing the clean notes using noise reduction. This leaves better access to all those nasty spikes and you can then clean them out of the other file by using noise source on the first file and noise reduction on the second.

But like i said. I'm not an audio engineer, Try and grab the attention of a cool audo dude and see if you can present it as a challenge to him/her. I'm a designer/artist and right now I have to bet back to blocking levels out in MAX for my contractor. Stupid deadlines.

[Brother Android]

Funny, I kind of like the way they sound...

Anyway, I think there's not too much restoring that can be done with things that damaged. You could reconstruct the pitches but I don't know that there's any helping the loss of intelligibility of the words, at least with the second one. Where are these recordings taken from? Are they just really old recordings? Because if so... well, you can only do so much to no-fi source material. But then, I'm no audio master, and would be happy to be proven wrong.

I've got my hands on some cool old CD set from the early 20th century

Didn't know they were making CDs back then. :D

[Saker]

Thank you guys for all your help , I've already tried Audacity but it didn't make much difference - like craig stren said , i guess i have to find an audio engineer since making cover versions is not possible right now .

@Zenorf : Thanks man , you gave me some hope it may be fixed .

@Jabberwock : yes , from 1912 to 1923 , so , they are quite old

Didn't know they were making CDs back then. :D

Obviously i meant the content of the CDs :D