Several months ago, Gale or Steve (I think) posted a link to download the old Noise Removal utility, for those of us who loved that feature and are unable to get excellent results from the Noise Reduction utility which replaced it. I have searched the forum and I can’t find that link or any mention of it. Please again provide that link to download the old Noise Removal utility.
This is fascinating. I join thousands of Audacity users who never got Noise Removal to do anything useful, but a tiny group of users including a forum elf think it was a gift from the angels.
I agree: fascinating. For years,Noise Removal accomplished my goal perfectly, every time, hundreds of times. But the Noise Reduction tool is worthless to me.
Are you actually using the current Audacity 2.1.2 from http://audacityteam.org/download/? In that version, Noise Reduction has a sensible “Frequency smoothing” default value of 3. It was 0 (off) in the first version of Noise Reduction, and that was the main reason most users had problems with it.
The other reason people have problems with the new effect is that the behaviour of Sensitivity changed. It is no longer a dB value in the new effect. Try the new default of 6 for Sensitivity in the new effect.
I use Noise Removal for one thing: to remove background noise. This is usually very light background noise generated while recording in my acoustically-imperfect and non-soundproofed home-studio. In addressing this particular background noise, the old Noise Removal was very superior to the Noise Reduction (at the default setting) in 2.1.0, which actually seems to add unpleasant artifacts to the audio being processed.