I downloaded a podcast that sounds like the podcaster is at the back of a cave and his microphone is 10 meters further back. Is there a tool in Audacity that I can use to make the sound more crisp? Thank you in advance.
De-reverb plug-in$ exi$t … https://youtu.be/pRW8KGjVOsk
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Thanks for the suggestion. I thought maybe there was a feature built in to Audacity. But this looks like a good option.
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For thousands of years, “recording in a kitchen” echoes were permanent. Echoes are your voice arriving at the microphone multiple different times bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling.
You are, in effect, asking any service to remove your voice from itself. There are no foreign tones to recognize.
Since conferencing (Skype, Zoom, Google Meat, etc) software has gotten good at recognizing clean, pure voice in a performance and removing anything else. This lets you do multiple party meetings clean without thinking about it too much.
However, these tools do have some interesting problems. Simple voice performances can sound odd, flat, and sterile with no echoes at all.
At least once a week someone posts on the forum that their echo/reverb repair software removed their guitar, piano, or other instruments.
Yes. That’s correct.
Koz
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You might want to try Adobe Podcast. https://podcast.adobe.com/en. It’s good at cleaning up speech files. You can do 30-minute files for free. I’m not sure if there’s a limit on the number of files you can do per day; I know you can do at least two files. If your file is longer than 30 minutes, you can use Audacity to split it into two files and then put it back together after you download the Adobe “enhanced” files.
I do my church website and use this to help our sermon files. We are still using a very old analog sound system and do not record videos. Our sermons are recorded on CDs and they are not great quality. I started using Adobe Podcast when one particular recording was terrible, with very low volume and lots of noise/hum. Using Audacity’s Noise Removal tool distorted the audio way too much, but Adobe Podcast cleaned it up pretty good! I still use Audacity to edit the “enhanced” files I get from Adobe; I need to use Compressor to make them louder, there are still some audible breaths that I want to get rid of, and there are a few other things I like to edit. But Adobe Podcast gets rid of the “hum” noise as well as plosives and other distracting microphone noises. Even our “good” recordings are improved by Adobe Podcast a lot more than I can do using Audacity, especially since I’m an amateur and do not understand how to use some of the tools in Audacity - but it’s probably easier, even if I did know how to use those tools (such as the Spectrum tools) and edit it manually.
The sermons are virtually always longer than 30 minutes, so to separate them into two files I first find a point before the 30-minute mark where I want to split the file and select the audio from that point to the end of the track. Then I “cut” the selected audio, so it’s stored on my clipboard. I then go back to the beginning (I don’t know if I really need to do this, but it’s only one click) and add a new track. Then I click inside the new track and then click to go back to the beginning (so that the cursor is at the very beginning of the track). Then I use “paste” to put the 2nd part of the audio into the new track. From there, it’s easy to select each track separately and export them one at a time to a “wav” or other uncompressed file. I then upload one file into Adobe Podcast and then download the enhanced version. Then I do the same with the second file. (There are probably other ways to make two separate files, but this is how I do it.)
To put the files back together, I open a “New File” in Audacity and use “Import” to import both tracks at once. I make sure the first track is on top and the second one is on the bottom. Then I select “all” and use “Align Tracks” “end to end” to get them spaced correctly. Then I “select all” again and use “Mix and Render” which puts the two tracks back together.
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