Greetings, can someone help? I landed an audiobook and am struggling mightily with removing breath sounds and mouth noises. I am trying to upload the files but they are “too big”
“too big”
Stereo WAV over about ten seconds is too big, yes. Mono (one blue wave) runs out of poop (technical term) at 20 seconds. You can’t post a book chapter.
In general, you should avail yourself of the services of a file hosting service such as Drop-Box, Google-Drive, etc. If the work is under about 25MB, you might be able to email it to someone. Check first.
However, you may be able to slide in under the forum restrictions by announcing the voice test.
https://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/TestClip/Record_A_Clip.html
You can also post much longer presentations by using MP3 instead of WAV. The problem there is the distortion that MP3 generates. We can’t tell who’s wrong, you or the MP3.
I will be closely watching this posting because that’s exactly why I’m not a world-famous audiobook artist. Too many tongue-ticks, mouth pops, lip-smacks, emphasis whistles, and breath noises.
Fair warning if you’re really good at making noises, you may spend the rest of your life patching the errors. Much better not making the noises in the first place.
But yes, there are ways to custom fit a quiet patch that exactly matches the noise, and makes it seem like you know what you’re doing.
As we go.
Koz
Struggling is a good sign; giving up is not 
I record audio books and I suck in air, open my lips with a smack, the whole range.
As well I have timing problems for gaps, when I feel a sneeze coming on.
I wrote a half-dozen simple Audacity macros, all but one of which place gaps of a specific length where I want them. One of the macros is a “delete and play back”, the rest are “replace and play back”.
My favorite macro is where I worked out how to locate all gaps “greater than two seconds” because my proof-listener ruled against long gaps.
Note that these are editing macros, post-recording.
Let me know if you think that they might help and I will post them here.
Cheers
Chris
There it is. Two relatively new tools. Punch In and Punch And Roll.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_punch_in_repair_of_recordings.html
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/punch_and_roll_record.html
The example has you fixing a mistake such as a bad sung phrase or musical passage. In our case, we would be using carefully selected portions of “Room Tone” or background noise to cover up Lip Smacks…etc.
Before Punch In, it was almost impossible to correct the middle of a performance because you had to not only carefully identify the damage, but also customize the repair sound, and if you messed either one up, it could change the duration of the song.
The way I understand the new tools, all you need to do is identify some patch sound likely longer than the errors, carefully locate an error, and punch. From very fuzzy memory, there is even provision for automatically extending the cover-up sound if you run out by accident.
Koz
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T4JYTn17JFrUR5mbSARuCkFA6dSIUgS1/view?usp=sharing
This is the first of many chapters; it is a book of affirmations
Chris I’ll take you up on that offer; I am more than willing to use any and all tools at my disposal to address and hopefully fix my problem! Thanks on advance for the help!