So I have been trying to remove the white noise from my mic in an audio clip, and it doesn’t seem to be working. I select a portion of the clip that is just white noise, I hit Effect → Noise Removal, and hit “Get Noise Profile.” I then select the entire clip, hit Effect → Noise Removal, but the values have not changed whatsoever.
I am using Audacity 2.0.2, which I believe I got from the .exe, and I am using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.
My mic is a Samson C01U.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
P.S. If anybody has any tips on how to maintain the quality of the audio while reducing the white noise (I think it is just noise from the mic because it is a low- to mid-range mic), then I’d also appreciate that a great deal! It’s not catching things like my breath or fans, but there is a lot of just, well, noise.
Next time before you take a profile, Effect > Amplify > OK the sample first. That will boost it up to the maximum you can do without distortion. Then take the profile then UNDO your way back to normal.
Then select the area of the show to be reduced (don’t do the whole thing at first) and Effect > Noise Reduction > 18, 0, 150, 0 (from the top). OK.
That should have some significant effect.
It should be noted that you can’t actually reduce white/pink/brown noise. Noise reduction works by carefully generating a suite of filters at the pitches or frequencies of the “clean” trash in the profile. White noise generates filters at all frequencies. So it’s trying to reduce the whole show from itself.
Mess with the smoothing value (with the same profile). What that does is tell how much of the spoken word or singing is not affected by reduction. The idea here is to actually reduce the noise between words and depend on nobody being able to tell that there is still noise during speech.
If the noise is bad enough, it doesn’t work. You sound like a science fiction character or a talking snake.
kozikowski, your solution was about what I have tried thus far. I’ve messed with the sliders and I have gotten it to reduce the noise, but it’s still pretty apparent, and slightly more shrill, so I’m not sure if it is technically better to the ear. Your particular settings that you suggested may have helped a bit, but it’s hard to tell as everything is simply much quieter. (Tried it with a 10 second clip of the file.)
Any other thing you guys could advise me on to make the present clip cleaner? I could upload a five second or so clip of the noise by itself if you like.
Also, and advice on what I could do in the future to make it quieter? Maybe something I could do before or during recording?
5 seconds of noise (on its own) as a WAV file and 2 or 3 seconds of the audio + noise as another WAV file would allow us to try different settings and give some indication of what is possible.