Noise Gate, built-in vs. plug-in

I have been reading in other forums that Audacity’s built-in Noise Gate actually adds noise and isn’t ideal. I personally feel like it adds a bit of static sounds. Any suggestions on other plug-ins that work better? Someone recommended iZotope but it’s not free.

It doesn’t, but dither is optional-intentional noise added when you export.

Dither is supposed to sound better than “natural” quantization noise but at 16-bits or better can’t usually hear dither or quantization noise under normal listening conditions so it’s not THAT important one way or the other.

The theory is that you should dither whenever you lower the bit depth and only when you lower the bit depth.

Don’t believe everything you read.
(Disclosure: I wrote the Noise Gate effect)

P.S.
When a noise gate is closed it lowers (or kills completely) the noise and everything else.

But the analog noise from our amplifier can be more noticeable with silence or a lower signal (a lower signal-to-noise ratio).

If you have the attack time too short, (say 1ms), a gate could add a click noise when it opened, but that’s user-error: the default setting on the Audacity gate is 10ms.

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.