Hello everyone, newbie here. I have this audio I’m trying to edit for FCPX, and for the life of me, I can’t figure this out. I have enclosed a pic of the spectrograph waveform I see here in Audacity. You see those dark blue bands in the middle of the audio image? They abruptly cut off just after 1:09. That is some electronic interference of some sort that came in over my mic while recording the audio. Now I think I understand the whole Hz thing and I can go into FCPX and choose “Hum Removal” at 50hz and it does eliminate most of the hum, but I end up with this audio that sounds muddy and echoey. So I’ve been trying to play with it in Audacity. Problem is, the lines seem to run the entire spectrum vertically, like bars. You can see that in the image. So how do I remove this in Audacity? I’ve tried the spectral edit multi tool, and it does work in reducing or eliminating the noise, but it also kills the voice audio as well. Any suggestions?
When noise is spread vertically like that, it is called “broadband noise”. It’s virtually impossible to fix it (in any software).
You may have seen in a spy film, the spy turns on the shower so that they can whisper to someone without being overheard by bugging devices. The reason they do that is because the sound of a shower is broadband noise, and it’s virtually impossible to isolate the voice out from the noise.
CB radio, fighter pilot radio, and such like have the same problem. What they do to mitigate the problem is to use “squelch”. Squelch does not improve the sound quality, but it suppresses the noise when no-one is speaking (Squelch - Wikipedia). “Noise gates” may be used in similar fashion (Missing features - Audacity Support)