Hello
The air conditioning was running in the background during a conference and I’d like to remove that noise without the speaker’s voice sounding unnatural. By using the defaults, it sounds a bit too compressed, “bubbly”.
What settings should I start playing with? Noise reduction (dB), Sensitivity (dB), Frequency smoothing (Hz), and Attack/decay time (secs)
Thank you.
I would suggest you’re never going to get to a Sound Stage quality performance, and we don’t do forensics. We can’t pull a performance out of trash.
As in the instructions, the tools works in two steps. Define the noise by itself and then apply the tool based on that definition.
The way the latest version of Noise Reduction works is to stop working when someone is speaking to prevent honky, bubbling speech. The theory is people can ignore noise when it’s being masked by other sounds, but people notice right away when there’s actual voice damage.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/noise_removal.html
The dB setting is how much correction. Below 6 isn’t significant and above about 18 - 24 may be too much and cause other damage. You can try other values. Select a noisy segment of the show and not the whole show. You will be going back and forth between these tools and if you try to reduce the whole show immediately, you could be there a long time.
I set Smoothing and Attack/Decay by listening to voices. Smoothing affects how much of the voice goes through unaffected by reduction and Attack/Decay is the tiny area before and after each word. Reduce smoothing until you start to lose voices and then go back up. If you go too high, the noise between words comes back.
Koz
Thank you. Lowering “dB setting” was enough to improve the audio.