How to reduce reverb or echo?

follow up https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-reduce-reverb-or-echo/23062/1 my post here is NOT platform-specific [myself on Audacity 2.3.3 Ubuntu 20.04]

On a quite echoey reverbey phone interview found on youtube this is what i did to lessen the echo/reverb which great results; almost all of it was gone; as mentioned by others it is nor perfect but TOTALLY workable/usable

➊ use Effects/Noise Reduction
➋ do NOT use the Get Noise Profile
➌ set dB to 4 or 6 or whatever you want to get maybe 2 is enough maybe as high as 8 or 10


Hope this is of use to some of you


This is a very interesting finding in that

  1. I have always heard that you can’t get rid of reverb and echo and
  2. To use Noise Reduction you need to first get a profile.

Do you care to post your before and after audio (.WAV) so we can see for ourselves how you fared?

Do you suspect that Noise Reduction was using a profile that you had run earlier? For example, did you try this by first getting a noise profile of total silence?

If you use the entire audio as the noise-profile, (not just the noise),then noise-reduction acts like an expander, which will reduce reverb when you are not speaking. But better to use an actual expander plug-in: it will do less collateral damage …

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/envelope-follower-ducker/47090/1

Maybe by not having a profile it is just noise-gating it (since the echo is softer than the signal itself) maybe you could use the noise gate and adjust it to get the same result.

Just tried it again on an Old Zappa bootleg track with was VERY echoey and nice results

before >>
No Profile Set to 8 >>
Amplified >>


And the sound is MUCH improved

Here first pic before process second after No Profile Set to 10+ Amplified /// Original Flac then exported to alac (both lossless)

Hello, try this one: Dereverb plugin

Thanks this was helpful