Interview: What to do about the noise on the non-speaking pa

[morvenwestfield]

Over the weekend I did my first interview using SkypeOut and MX Skype Recorder. Worked like a charm. (I'm a real noob and at this point in my podcasting, I'm going for quick-and-dirty. Later I'll enhance my skills.)

The only problem is that I notice that there's a little bit of noise on the track of the person who isn't speaking. What would be the best approach here? I'm using Audacity 1.2.6.

1. Ignore it. No one else will really hear it.
2. Use Audacity's Noise Removal to clean up those sections.
3. Use volume control and turn down the non-speaking track until it's that person's turn to speak.

Other suggestions? I'm looking for quick and "good enough."

Someone suggested I use a noise gate, but I didn't find any effect by that name. The nearest I could find were hard limiter, high pass filter, and low pass filter. Would any of those be good?

I plan to do more interviews this way. Any suggestions on how to keep the noise low on the non-speaker's side? Sometimes the noise is a click, like the person moved or something (I'm wearing a headset, so that's possible.)

Thanks!

Morven


http://www.morvenwestfield.com
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[kozikowski]

<<<Someone suggested I use a noise gate>>>

No, you can't use a noise gate and you can't use regular noise tools, either. Noise gates seem great and everybody uses them...once. Then they go out in the garage. They sound terrible and they're extremely hard to adjust to get awful results.

A word about nose. You will probably never get rid of what you have because you don't have noise. You have parts of the performance you don't like. Noise tools work by memorizing the evil sounds without the performer speaking, and then trying to subtract the memorized trash from the whole performance. So the noise has to be there at the beginning and constant for the whole show. This works great with background air conditioners or noisy microphones, or sometimes a bad cable and audio hum. It won't do a thing for somebody smacking their microphone once by accident 20 minutes into the performance.

For that, I would recommend editing. Find the impact waveform by magnifying the timeline and then use the other tools to either suppress it, or turn it into something else.

Major important video conference systems have the same problem. Video is a snap, but everybody in the conference ends up yelling over the air conditioner noise from each of the other locations added up.

It's not pretty.

Are you recording each conversation individually so you have access to each individual track?

Koz

[morvenwestfield]

Thanks for the info. I ended up finding the tiny blips in the non-speaking part and using Noise Removal to sample the noise and then selected the non-speaking part and applied noise-removal. It seemed to help, but I'm not sure. I'm still learning about audio in general.

Are you recording each conversation individually so you have access to each individual track?

Mx Skype Recorder gives me an MP3 file and when I import it into Audacity, it comes in as two (tracks?) and then I can use Split Stereo to make them individual. So, yes, each one of us ends up on a different track. I'm on the Right (channel?) and my guest is on the Left.

I'm getting Podcasting for Dummies soon, which should help. (Yeah, I should have read it first, but I went through the tutorials and felt confident -- at the time.) I suspect, though, that I'm going to have the same problem with audio software that I do with graphics software: I don't know the underlying art/science well enough to use the fine tools in front of me. I plan to do a *lot* of reading up on it.

Thanks for your patience.

Morven