I’m a newbie. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to remove noise… mainly because I couldn’t understand the directions. Would someone please rewrite it so the directions are more clear? IF NOTHING ELSE, AT LEAST REWRITE IT SO IT’S 5 STEPS. SO IT’S CLEAR THEY WANT YOU TO SELECT THE AUDIO FIRST, BEFORE CLICKING EFFECT AND NOISE REMOVAL. Please please please. Thank you.
Step 1: Select (or highlight) # to # seconds of the noise (white noise, static or hum) you want Audacity to remove. [“A few” means different things to different people. Be clear. Tell us how many seconds you want. 1 to 3 ? 5 to 10 ? 10 to 20 ? How many is a few?]
Step 2: Click effect. Click noise removal. Click the box below. [Instead of get noise profile, why not have a box that says “remove this noise” ? ]
Step 3: Select (or highlight) the audio you want to filter. (If you want to filter the entire track, click on the track and then press Ctrl+A.) [There might be a better way to say this. I just can’t think of better words right now.]
Step 4: Click effect. Click noise removal. Choose how much noise you want filtered out. [See boxes for noise reduction frequency smoothing attack/delay.]
Step 5: Click the box below. [And the box says remove noise now.]
I’m not sure which manual you are looking at. The current manual is here: Noise Removal
The length of the noise sample is not critical. The important thing is that the sample is representative of the noise that you wish to remove. Sometimes that can be done with half a second, other times it may require substantially more.
The manual says:
This first step teaches Audacity about the noise you want to remove by identifying the noise floor of the different frequencies comprising the noise.
Select a region of the waveform which contains only noise. This doesn’t need to be very long, a second is enough. If there are very different types of noise in different places in the track, they are best dealt with by grabbing the profile for the first type, removing the noise for it, then grabbing the profile of the next type of noise and removing that.
I think this description is a lot more informative than just saying “Select 2 seconds” or some other arbitrary number.
The Noise Removal section of the manual is due for renewal as this effect has now been improved and the improved effect will be appearing in the next version of Audacity.
Every effort is made to make the manual clear and concise, and documentation is an ongoing task for the volunteers that do it.