I have this Skype interview to edit for the boss. I used the Noise Removal effect in Audacity (the only thing I can reliably use) and here’s a piece of the audio i came up with.
That echo is quite distracting. What can i do to fix this?
What else should i do to this recording to make it more professional? I know nothing about sound quality so any advice will truly be appreciated. I’m trying to figure out how I can use Audacity to clean up Skype recordings for the future as well since face-to-face interview won’t be happening anytime soon.
That echo is quite distracting. What can i do to fix this?
You’re the interviewer, right? I think you’re stuck. There’s no easy, clean way to record chat (Skype, Zoom) interviews. It helps a lot if you’re both on headphones and not going hands-free like your guest is.
The desperation repair method is use the Audacity zoom tools…
…and make your side of the conversation large enough so you can select it and paste room tone over it. You can’t just cut them out or paste silence because that will give you little dead spots over the interview. You should totally do this before you noise reduce the piece.
If you haven’t already, export a perfect quality WAV protection copy of the interview before you do anything to it and keep that WAV file in a safe place separate from the Audacity machine.
Do you have a high quality version of your voice? Were you wearing headphones? If you weren’t, your recording is going to have the same quality problems in reverse.
I’m trying to figure out how I can use Audacity to clean up Skype recordings for the future
So is everybody else on Earth. Everybody is discovering how bad chat quality is. It’s not a gift from the angels that the companies like you to think.
That’s not to say good quality is impossible, but it’s not convenient, easy, or cheap.
This is an engineering test I did with Denise over Skype. It’s heavily cut for time. We’re four time zones apart.
We’re both broadcast professionals, we’re both wearing good quality headphones, and I’m recording using two computers and a sound mixer—roughly the same way the broadcasters do it.
The chat companies offer to record your chat for you, but you both have to be on Skype and there are a lot of complaints about sound quality. They have the same problem you do.
