Over the last three weeks I’ve been experimenting with this plugin, which I’d hoped would serve me better for some very challenging natural soundscape recordings with erratically variable background sound of a gentle wind swishing in a mass of bracken — the ‘wanted’ sounds being flies, bees, birds and indeed the odd aeroplanes (which latter I could choose to cut out later on), for a pioneering musical project.
My immediate impression was very favourable, as compared with Audacity’s built-in noise reduction function — at least, when I’d arrived at the optimum level for me to use (12 out of 100) using the Deepfilternet2 model. However, when I started making my musical creations from the OpenVino processed recordings I found the fly / bee sounds too abrupt for my use.
Very careful and close comparison of files processed with OpenVino, with the same processed with Audacity’s noise reduction effect to 6dB reduction level (more reduction degrades the sound too much and produces too prominent artifacts) showed that the OV-processed examples had a low-amplitude ‘gating’ effect — i.e., a sound that should fade in and/or out would appear and disappear too abruptly. Thus all the flies and bees in my recordings were sounding too abrupt, and lacking in the musical gracefulness that I could hear withouth OV processing.
That makes OpenVino, although superficially very attractive, useless for my purposes. That may well not matter for many people’s uses of it, but I do recommend critical examination of OV-denoised recordings for that effect at least if one’s recordings are of natural soundscapes or music of any sort, especially where it is very quiet.
Just maybe future versions of the tool would overcome that issue, though I’m not exactly holding my breath…