Hi, I want to ask you if it would be possible to add Start and End Pad option into Noise Gate. I believe that this will be very helpful. This would allow to set higher threshold, so the noises/breaths could be removed, but the speeches will be preserved by the pads.
Thank you very much for taking into consideration.
What do you mean by “pads”?
Sorry not being clear enough. Maybe it is not the right word. Anyway, the best example that I can find is Start/End Pad in Strip Silence - that’s Pro Tools feature.
On this page I found this explanation: Using the Region Start and End Pad controls, you can adjust the amount of silence that is kept intact either side of the wanted audio.
Or here it is written: Region Start/End Pad: These two parameters decide how much padding is left at the beginning and end of a trimmed region, much like the minimum strip duration, these are useful settings to ensure that any required information which is perhaps below the set threshold is not removed.
This is exactly what I mean by “pad”.
Thank you for considering.
“Strip Silence” is not a noise gate. It is more like Audacity’s “Truncate Silence” effect: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/truncate_silence.html
I just used it only as analogy to answer your first question. Of course, it is different tool, but there is feature Start/End Pads, so this is only one reason why I mentioned it. Please do you understand what I mean by “pads”? If you do not, I can try to explain more.
Thank you for your patience.
The Noise Gate has an “Attack / Decay” feature which is similar.
Yes, there is Attack/Decay and I dit a lot of testing to work only with this option, but there is a huge limitation. Maybe the following drawings show clearly the difference between Attack/Decay and Start/End Pad:
yellow=part of audio above threshold
orange=Attack/Decay
green=Start/End Pad
light-blue=audio reduced by gate (by set amount of dB)
Noise Gate without Start/End Pad:
Because I do not want to cut end of sentences, I must set threshold lower. But it means that a lot of noises are above threshold, so Level reduction is not applied on them.
Noise Gate with Start/End Pad:
With Start/End pads I can set higher threshold, because now I have extra space before and after yellow boxes that is preserved (green boxes), so Noise Gate will not touch the ends of sentences, but it will suppress much more unwanted noises.
Thank you.
Your first image is not quite right. The orange region should be outside of the yellow region.
The technical terms for your suggested enhancement are:
Lookahead (padding before the sound)
Hold (padding after the sound)
The Nyquist Noise Gate plug-in does use lookahead, but for simplicity of use, it is preset to the same as the attack time. This ensures that the sound is restored to full gain as soon as the signal level rises above the trigger level.
There are several extra features that ‘could’ be added to the Noise Gate, but the design emphasises ease of use. The more controls and options, the more intimidating the effect becomes and the more knowledge is needed to use it effectively. I do not intend to add more features at this time because I think the simplicity is more important for most of our users.
As the effect is a Nyquist plug-in, it can be modified fairly easily. There is quite a lot of documentation for making and modifying Nyquist plug-ins in the Audacity manual and the Audacity wiki. We also have a forum board for help with Nyquist: https://forum.audacityteam.org/viewforum.php?f=39
Alternatively, you could search on-line for free VST Noise Gates to find other options.
“JB Phatt Pro” is a free compressor/expander/gate plugin that works in Audacity on Windows …
IMO most of the old JB (Jeroen Breebaart) plugins are worth having …
https://web.archive.org/web/20130329211641/www.jeroenbreebaart.com/audio_vst_jb.htm
That looks like a nice plug-in with lots of knobs to twiddle. I guess that the side chain does not work in Audacity (?)
It has >30 factory presets for those unfamiliar with what the knobs do …
No, but everything else works.