Removing background women talking in a male interview

Hello,

First of all, congratulations to this forum and the Audacity developers. Both of them have been very useful for me in the last years.

I’m working with Audacity 2.1.1 in windows 10 to improve the sound of a Spanish interview with a man that is mixed with background females voices. The interview was recorded with a cannon in a classroom, so besides the male voices, the talking of the female pupils that were outdoor are listened in the background. I applied the noise reduction, that has worked well to silence the noise and reduce a little the backgroung talking. After, I used the equalizer to remove the metallic sound. The thing is that the result is not very good and a spectral voices are listened when the interviewee speaks. I’ve tried to use Nyquist Prompt following this post, https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/removing-background-vocals-from-audacity-recording/34724/14 but I didn’t get to make it work. I attach two cut files as a sample of the clean audio and the original audio.

Please, any idea?

Thank you very much and please, apologize my English.

Not possible to separate the male & female voices by frequency-content.
Making the stereo track mono removes the wide-stereo-hiss, which is a bit distracting.

Can attenuate the audio of the background only when the man is not talking by using this “dynamic mirror” plug-in
Dynamic-Mirror demo (as expander).gif

Post back if you get something to work and tell us how you did it.

As a fuzzy rule, we can’t split performances apart into individual voices, instruments or sounds. Leaving a TV on by accident behind your performance is a good way to kill the show. You have a cousin to that problem, although yours is a little less deadly because the background voices are actually in the background. Did you try Effect > Noise Gate?

https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Effect_Plug-ins#Noise_Gate

It’s possible to experience the horror of a reshoot.

Koz

Original Audio with aggressive Noise Gate.

Koz

Dynamic-Mirror plugin can be aggressive …
Dynaimc-Mirror used as (aggressive) expander.gif