How do I remove VHS noise?

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Good morning, How do I remove VHS noise in Audacity? Can I help me please?
Version: Audacity 3.7.3
OS: Windows 11

2

This is no help to you what-so-ever, but I found it interesting that when I do a Google search for VHS noise, about half of the people are trying to remove it and half are trying to add it to their digital audio files.

3

You can ty regular Noise Reduction which requires that you feed it a Noise Profile of noise-only. Note that sometimes you can get artifacts/side-effects and “the cure can be worse than the disease”, especially if the noise is bad. So you may end-up preferring the original.

There is also AI Noise Suppression which I have not tried.

4

I have used Noise Recuction in the past with the now-default settings of 6,6,6 to remove FM carrier noise to good effect.

@Tristancorso911 the trick with your VHS noise will be to find a small section which is just VHS noise.

Peter.

5

Good point about artifacts — I’ve definitely run into that with aggressive settings where it starts smearing details or creating weird halos. The 6,6,6 default noise reduction has worked well for me too in a lot of cases, especially for cleaning up consistent interference like FM carrier noise.

@Tristancorso911 — yeah, isolating a clean patch of just VHS noise is key. That way you can train the filter or profile properly without risking it cutting into actual detail. If you can find a few seconds of blank tape or static between scenes, that’s usually perfect.

6

How do I remove hum from VHS audio?

7

There’s a mains hum removal plugin for Audacity …
https://plugins.audacityteam.org/nyquist-plugins/effect-plugins/filters-and-eq#hum-remover