Noise Reduction of background hummng

[kozikowski]

I know it's bad form to directly compare other programs, but I swear CoolEdit had settings for profile capture as well as application.

Koz

[steve]

Why not Amplify at the default settings? Wouldn't you want the largest sample you could get short of clipping?

It's certainly worth testing with different amplification amounts, but there seems to be a sweet spot which is often around 8 dB amplification. Going back to my "rubbing out crayon scribble" analogy, you want to increase the vigour of the rubbing out, but not too much.

I swear CoolEdit had settings for profile capture as well as application.

Yes, it had settings for profile size and profiles could be saved / loaded.
There were also more options for the noise removal step including fft size, transition width and a kind of equalizer that allowed the noise threshold level to be adjusted according to frequency. I think that the underlying method for noise removal was similar to Audacity but the GUI was more sophisticated and possibly a bit more complicated.

I found that I tended to use the same FFT size most of the time, so I don't think it's much of a loss not having that as a user option.
The "Transition Width" was very much a subtle fine tuning and in most cases would be left at the default "0".
The "equalizer graph thing" (don't remember the name - "spectral something") was probably the most useful additional feature but a similar effect can be produced in Audacity by EQ'ing the noise sample before capturing it. Perhaps this could be mentioned as an "advanced technique" on the Noise Removal wiki page?

I think that "Save / Load Profile" would be a useful addition to the Audacity NR effect. Have you posted that as a Feature Request Koz?