Audacity Forum

free-of-charge, i make videos on behalf of at-risk animals (to help them become more adoptable) and also on behalf of sanctuaries and shelters (who struggle to care for and keep the animals) so they might attract more donations and volunteer support.

i was filming at an animal shelter in Rockland, ME (i film and edit on my iphone using Voddio). during a few interviews we had to use a room that had background noise (the worst: an air conditioner)

i hope you can help me.

i've gotten the watery effect (regarding the woman i interviewed) and background sounding now like a tibetan healing chant. , tried to adjust the setting so i wouldn't get those effects, but failed. whatever i tried, the background noise was not reduced, at least not so i could notice. (the "silence" was about 1/16-1/8 inch thick at its thinnest point. when i zoomed in to try to get a "thinner" bar, there was only a second of it captured.maybe the noise print needed more time .) i did review the instructions often. a bit confused when trying to use the sensitivity, frequency smoothing, attack/decay sliders--and didn't understand what "isolate" means.

is there hope?

in advance, thank you for your response.

The watery effect happens when you take too much "noise" out and it starts affecting the voices. You really need to get a good profile or everything else you do will be seriously uphill against the wind.

The 10,000 foot view:

You drag-select a portion of the show that's noise by itself. This is reeeeely important. Get Noise Profile. The next time you open Noise Reduction, it will try to subtract that profile from the rest of the show, or whatever portion you select. If you capture a little voice in the profile by accident, then part of the show singing voice will go, too.

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Removal

It is a juggling act and no guaranteed success.

Koz

The grownups call it "room tone." What does the room sound like before you start performing. If the room tone is complex, dogs barking, TV running, traffic going by, you may have no show. You will probably never separate the voices from the trash. If it's straight air conditioning, it's very tricky, but you can usually help a little.

You should probably know that the noise during each spoken word does not go away, just the background noise between words. If you defeat that, then the words start sounding like martians. That's the smoothing slider. To the left and it tries to noise reduce everything including voices. To the right, it tries to "go around" the voices and just reduce the quiet spaces.

The crossover point is where the voices are as loud as the trash. Worse than that and you go for a reshoot in a different room.

Koz