hi,
I have an old recording of a talk with background noises. Sounds to me like traffic but maybe more.
I installed audacity 3.1.3 on Windows 10 and tried for two hours using different effects but no results:
either noise remains or speech disappears.
Can anyone guide me please?
Attached a sample of the talk with noise, and a short noise segment i tried to use for the Noise Reduction profile.
Certain parts can be cleaned up, but not with Audacity unfortunately, I used Waves Clarity VX Pro as a first pass,
then ran it thru Izotope RX for a bit more cleaning, I find RX to be less effective at rough cleaning but more precise
on the finer details.
For example the car hooters can be made less obvious, some of the traffic noise reduced, the clinking of coffee or tea cups
and even that ringing telephone can be made less obvious.
The recording was so bandwidth limited that there was not much to work with so what I attached below is about the limit.
In fact the second file, where I pushed the cleaning a bit more, you can start hearing it sounding “metallic”.
Between 6kHz and 8kHz is just digital artefact noise, (like crickets).
Thanks!
So I also installed Waves Clarity VX Pro (trial edition) and messed with it for a couple of hours until I got a result good enough
for my humble needs (surely it would make this forum’s members laugh or cry).
I don’t have any background, so had to find out some facts that are seemingly so obvious that they are not worth explaining.
For future ignorant visitors like me:
Clarity VX is just a plugin. You have to install another program that is the “host” so you can apply VX filter.
I installed a trial edition of a program called Reaper.
Open your input file in Reaper, select the only track (in my case),
click “fx” and find the Clarity plugin (assuming you had it installed and activated - follow “waves” instructions).
Play the file and listen to it filtered while turning the round gauge until you find the right balance between aggressiveness of filtering and
voice distortion.
Once satisfied, File - Render lets you save the result to an output file.
There are a zillion other options, functions and plugins, but that’s the shortest path I found for a simple noise reduction on a human voice recording.
Thanks again to the responders here.
Well done and remember, when cleaning/restoring audio, there is no real right or wrong.
If it sounds good to you, then it’s right.
The waves plugin works well, I don’t recommend the “lite” version as it’s pretty limited.
Unfortunately, waves plugins have never been compatible with Audacity so a full featured DAW (host) like you mentioned, will be needed.
I have an old recording of a talk with background noises.
You had two problems. Background noises and you didn’t shoot it. So not only do you have to fix the sound, you have to be good at the analysis tools to sort how broken it is.
Koz
