Removing a repeating sound throughout all of an audio track?

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

I’ve got a 90 minute audio file of an interview and every so often there’s a loud BEEP noise that lasts about half a second. It’s the same identical beep every time and it occurs throughout the entire 90 minutes of audio, ranging from about 1 to 20 times a minute. The beeping is much louder than the voices in the interview and is very annoying so I’d like to get rid of every instance that it occurs. I can zoom in, manually select every half-second beep and choose “Silence Audio” which works but manually doing this for all 90 minutes would take me forever. So is there any automated alternative?

I already tried Noise Removal; I selected one of the beeps, clicked “Get Noise Profile” and then implemented the noise removal on the entire audio track but no matter how I adjusted the sliders I was never able to remove only the beeping, it would always make the voices inaudible as well. Either that or the voices would still be audible but the beeping would still be practically just as audible as before. If it makes any difference, when “Show Clipping” is selected, all of the beeps are highlighted in red. So, maybe there’s a way to completely silence all instances of clipping within an audio track? Or just greatly reduce the volume for the beeps while keeping the volume the same for the rest of the audio track? I’m a newbie to Audacity so I’m hoping someone here can help me figure out a solution for this. Thanks in advance.

2

What was the source/cause of the beeping?

3

You’ll probably have to do it manually.

If it’s a pure single-frequency tone, you may be able to use a notch filter to kill (or reduce) that frequency. But, most real-world sounds contain multiple frequencies (making it hard to filter) and there will likely be some overlap between the beep and the voice-frequencies that you want to keep (making it hard to filter without also filtering-out part of the voice).

A program like [u]Izotope RX[/u] might be able to “build” a custom filter. (I don’t know. I don’t own that program.)

I already tried Noise Removal

Noise reduction works best when you have a tiny-constant background noise. i.e. It doesn’t work to remove a barking dog. Moast on-location movie dialog is re-recorded in a soundproof studio because noise reduction just isn’t that good. :frowning: