I am trying to get the noise removed from a phone conversation. While recording, the fan in the room was accidentally left on, so it is preventing me from hearing the person on the other end loud enough. It is a constant static throughout the whole conversation. Also the voice of the person on the other end is so soft I can barely hear her, but my voice is loud enough. I used a recording app on my smart phone that was supposed to record both sides of the conversation equally.
I got a clip of just the noise and did noise removal. It didn’t remove the noise, it just made it lower, but I still could barely hear her on the other end. So I did the removal again, but now I can’t hear her at all. How do I remove just the background noise? And how do I make her voice loud – at least equivalent to my loudness?
The kiss of death is “I can barely hear her…” The noise removal tools will not help you if the valuable work is almost not there at all. It’s not a forensics tool. The desirable performance has to be very much louder than the noise.
The profile step in Noise Reduction is very important. If you get a good sample of noise by itself, you can apply the tool to the whole show and crank up the reduction level (the first slider) and keep applying the tool with higher settings to see what happens.
Noise Reduction creates intentional sound damage and tries to restrict the damage to the noise. How well it works depends on the other sliders.
The other problem is separating the near and far voices. That’s also terrifically difficult and it’s the main reason we recommend software that records near and far on different tracks. So you can apply filters and correction to one without affecting the other.
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Removal
Koz