Isolating or Enhancing Voices from background chatter

I am 100% new to this and have some audio recordings I need to edit for some of my tracks. The booth was extremely loud and lots of background chatter, laughter, clanking, etc…was picked up. I’m a dummy and need to know if there is there anyway to enhance the vocals and/or dull the background noise. Thanks in advance!

Post a short clip, let’s hear if it’s completely ruined or salvageable, and if so, to what extent.

At best, you can only make slight improvements. Standard noise reduction works best when you have a very-quiet and constant background noise… It works best when you don’t really need it. If the noise is bad, The cure can be worse than the disease. :frowning:

You can run the Filter Curve effect with the Low roll-off for speech preset. Effect → Filter Curve → Mangage → Factory Presets → Low roll-off for speech. That will kill any low frequency (“bass”) noise without affecting the vocal frequencies.

Beyond that you can experiment (“Preview” first) with the Graphic Equalizer effect. It’s similar to the Filter Curve but IMO the sliders make it easier to experiment with. The voices (and the background noise) cover most of the frequency range so you can’t really isolate them, but the “main” voice frequencies are between about 150Hz and 400Hz and boosting the frequencies above about 5000Hz will boost the “T” and “S” sounds which can help with intelligibility. Or, it’s generally better to cut the other frequencies than to boost.

And we’ll be able to tell the best way forward when you post a sample of the work.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-post-an-audio-sample/29851/1

Don’t short-change us. You can post up to ten seconds on the forum.

Koz