Hello!
I recorded an interview using zencastr and my interviewee had a mechanical or robotic sound that seemed to appear periodically throughout the interview. I’ve attached a link to a sample file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v53g4wtv8rd06c6/sampleaudio.wav?dl=0
The interview is nearly 45 min long and it’s littered throughout. I’ve tried a number of filters, noise gate but I didn’t seem to improve the audio. Are their any ways to possibly improve this?
I know now that I should have stopped the interview and addressed it. I learned my lesson.
Thanks for any help.
-Matt
One of the odd problems with posting about this is describing it. It doesn’t sound like anything else in real life.
Are their any ways to possibly improve this?
I was able to get some tiny, marginal improvement in a similar problem by surgically copying some of those vibrating word tails onto their own track. Play the track and you should have a pile of buzzy tails and little or no human voice. Copying one buzzy tail multiple times works, too if you can get one good clean one. Select that whole buzzy track and use that for Effect > Noise Reduction > Profile.
Then select a larger chunk of interview and Effect > Noise Reduction > Reduce > OK. I just know you’re going to ask me what settings to use. I only got pieces here, too. I know if you get the first number, Reduction much above 12, the tools start to eat the interview and everything turns into cellphone voice.
I have gotten good, clean “normal” background noise reduction on audiobook voice readings with 6, 6, 6 (up to 12, 6, 6). The default Noise Reduction suite of settings is 12,6,3.
Got it. It’s the Dalek voice in Dr Who. “Exterminate!!”
It’s feedback. It’s the computer voice equivalent of that club band where they got one of the microphones up too loud. “Good evening everybody…eeeeEEEEEEEE.” In this case I’ll put money that one of you has their computer set to record internet sound, like “borrowing” music from YouTube. In this case, those settings are fighting with Zencaster for mastery of your sound channels…and Zencaster is losing.
You can make the damage far worse by not wearing headphones, best if both sides are wearing them.
There’s a reason the sound people are all wearing headphones.
Koz
We hope a great deal you have the interview in WAV and not MP3. The MP3 sound format creates similar sound distortion and if you patch and filter an MP3 track enough times, the compression distortion actually gets worse.
Never do production in MP3.
Koz
