Noise reduction in poor quality audio recording

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Raven16
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2016 7:01 pm
Operating System: Windows 8 or 8.1

Noise reduction in poor quality audio recording

Post by Raven16 » Wed Jun 29, 2016 7:10 pm

Windows 8.1 Audacity 2.1.2

I have a very poor audio recording (spoken) that I have to salvage and transcribe. I tried noise reduction but could not get a marked improvement. I admit I have no idea what I'm doing. I have looked at the help menus and tried to follow them but am not having much luck. Can anyone point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it. Sample recording attached.
Attachments
Sample.wav
Can't hear the voice well, lots of hissing
(1.18 MiB) Downloaded 15 times

kozikowski
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Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:57 pm
Operating System: macOS 10.13 High Sierra

Re: Noise reduction in poor quality audio recording

Post by kozikowski » Wed Jun 29, 2016 11:12 pm

This isn't Noise Reduction as much as Disaster Recovery which we don't do so well.

You need to be able to clearly hear the speech to know when they stop talking long enough to get the Noise Reduction Profile part of the process. That's where you let Noise Reduction "taste" or "sniff" the noise—by itself—to know what to remove. If the production is so far gone you can't do that with any accuracy, then it may be the end of the world.

The only worx-every-time filter we have is Effect > Equalization and select the telephone preset (attached). That strips away the low pitch and high pitch tones and hopefully, what's left is enough.

Koz
Attachments
Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 16.07.02.png
Screen Shot 2016-06-29 at 16.07.02.png (52.9 KiB) Viewed 188 times

Trebor
Posts: 9962
Joined: Sat Dec 27, 2008 5:22 pm
Operating System: Windows 8 or 8.1

Re: Noise reduction in poor quality audio recording

Post by Trebor » Thu Jun 30, 2016 1:28 am

Raven16 wrote: I have a very poor audio recording (spoken) that I have to salvage and transcribe ...
It is possible to remove some of the hiss , but that does not improve the intelligibility ...
''Sample'' before-after.flac
(698.04 KiB) Downloaded 26 times
if you resample the recording down to 8000Hz that removes a lot of hiss.

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