Eliminating extraneous sounds while recording

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I have recorded a live music concert with the help of my IPhone. I wish to transfer the recording to my laptop using audacity. However while recording there are extraneous sounds including people clapping after each song. Is there some way that I can eliminate or at least reduce the impact of these sounds while saving the songs to my laptop. The OS on my laptop is Windows 7 and I have installed Audacity 2.0.2. Thanks in anticipation. Krishna.

2

Audacity doesn’t do anything in real time. No filters and no effects. Just straight record and playback.

You can’t do it in post production later, either. Once you capture a performance it becomes a mixed show and you can’t take a mixed show apart into individual instruments, voices … or applause.

People go to great effort with special microphones to get a live performance and nothing else.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/sennheiserShotgun.jpg

If they could easily split the parts of the performance, then the White House Press Office wouldn’t need those microphones every time.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/whiteHousePoolMicrophones.jpg

Sorry. I know it sounds like you should be able to make this work, but we have no good tools, and I don’t think anybody else does either.

Koz

3

What the poster is asking is to remove applase at the end of each song.

Audacity, as Koz says can’t remove the applause while the song is going on - but you can trim the applause and fade out the song to minimize the effect and duration of the applause.

The Audacity tools that you will need are

  1. Edit>Remove Audio>Silence Audio (k/b shortcut CTRL+L) use this to make silent, selected sections of audio.

  2. Edit>Remove Audio>Delete (k/b shortcut CTRL+K) use this to remove, selected sections of audio.

  3. Effect>Fade Out use this to fade out from the song to a short section of applause (or no applause if preferred). Tipcially the fade out should be applied to a section of audio 5-15 seconds or so. Try it at a particulatr length, then if you don’t like it just use Edit>Undo… to revert.

In the next version of Audacity there will be a more musical sounding fade out called Studio Fade Out which will probably give slightly better (more musical) fade results. I have been testing this new fade for the developer and now use it as my standard fade out of choice.

WC