I have a recording with voice that I need. However, an air purfier was making a lot of noise. So much so, that the voice I need to hear has been very hard to discern.
I have tried doing the steps I found online, which was
Normalize
Select a portion where there were no voices, but just the fan to get a sample.
Then selecting the entire track to remove the sound.
However, even though I have tried it about 12 times at all differant levels of “less” and “more”, it sill distorts the voices in such strange way, so much so I cannot detect it is speech.
Any tips or ideas?
I would not ask if it were not quite important to me.
Thanks in advance for any tips or help.
Jewelly
PS- I tried to attach a small section, but it would not take it any way I tried to export it. I tried wave, mps, aud and oog.
You can only upload .zip files no bigger than 256KB (I hope this changes in the future).
First things first, download and use Audacity 1.3.3. The Noise Removal function is vastly superior in the new version of Audacity and you’ll get much better results with it.
That said, don’t expect miracles. The Noise Removal function isn’t a forensics tool, it’s meant to clean up slightly noisy tracks. If you’ve got a recording with an unintelligible voice on it, Noise Removal probably isn’t going to magically make the voice come out. Remember than the human ear is much better at picking out specific sounds than a computer is (this is likely to be the case for another 20 years or so).
Your problem is going to be that you’ve got a large fan noise covering up the voice. Fans tend to occupy the same parts of the frequency spectrum as the human voice does, so the Noise Removal function is going to have a very hard time telling the two apart.
Ok, thanks for the tip about the new version. I will give that a try. At least now I know to not get my hopes up. Maybe I can at least get the voices discernable enough that I can take some notes.
Jewelly