Remove chirping, maybe by going mono

Hi folks,

I’m definitely an amateur at this, but I’ve been able to google answers fairly well so far and definitely want to thank the community for the answers to previous peoples’ questions that have helped me out, too.

Here’s my issue: I was given the task of cobbling together a video for a presentation on Monday. I was not the one who filmed the shots, I’m just assembling them. The problem is that the people who did the shots did them on an iPhone and often did them outdoors… there’s tons of static, wind noise, and even birds and crickets chirping on the track.

I’ve managed to remove MOST of this using noise filters, low and high pass filters, and simply muting chirps when they come in the middle of sections with no speech. My problem now is that the person being interviewed has a section about a minute long where there is no down time between words, she’s talking very rapidly and her words flow right on top of each other. This means there’s tons of chirping over top of her, and the noise filter didn’t pick it up.

Because this is for a video, I cannot change the time on it at all - everything that occurs must occur at the exact moment it did originally. I find that the time shift tool is too clunky to let me do anything surgically.

I discovered that the chirping is only on the right channel in this one minute section. This means I could use just the left channel, but if I simply silence the right channel, it’s now much quieter and the audience will have a hard time hearing her. I’ve already amplified as much as possible.

Is there a way to simply use the left channel for both left and right for that one minute section, without having to copy, paste, and time shift (since it’ll change the time)?

Try the “Channel Mixer” plug-in: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Effect_Plug-ins#Channel_Mixer
Instructions to install the plug-in: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Download_Nyquist_Plugins#install

Sometimes animals (e.g. birds, crickets), make noise at a constant-frequency, that’s something that can be quickly removed with a notch filter … http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/notch_filter.html . You need to look at the Spectrogram View or Plot Spectrum to see what that animal-frequency is.

Surgical precision is possible if you If you Zoom-in on the waveform.