Today, we look at a free audio editor, Audacity.  In particular, it has a great noise removal effect.

Cleaning sound in Audacity – a voice track.

First, we create a track and use the red button to record a few seconds of silence, and then a voice.

The denoise effect in Audible.

Now, we swipe the “silence” part of the track, which is really a bunch of background and mic noise.  Then, we select the noise removal effect.

Then we tell the effect plugin to “Get Noise Profile”.

Then, we go back to the track and swipe all of it.  Then, pull down the effect again and choose “OK”.

Now, look at how the effect has removed the noise from the entire track, including the part with the voice recording on it.

The result is a chunk of audio that sounds very professional.

More soon.

Recording voice for web postings.

I teach Introduction to 3D Animation at my university and record my desktop and my voice for each class session.  I post them so students can review them later.  (See wordsbybuzz.com and 3dbybuzz.com.) I also write fiction on the side and like to read and record my stories.  (See lheureux.co and buzzlheureux.com.)

The problem of cleaning audio.

In both cases, I find myself trying to clean audio.  Since I’m far from an audio expert, I’ve searched around for easy to use plugins that do a good job of removing noise without giving my voice a hollow sound – and without me having to futz around with the settings forever and manipulate audio parameters I don’t understand.

Three great products.

Here are three great out-of-the-box audio cleaning plugins that work with such applications as Bias’s Peak, Steinberg’s Wavelab (my favorite), Amadeus Pro (see the Apple App store), and Sound Studio Pro (see the Apple App store).  (Please note that I use Macs and that not all of these plugins work with all of these applications.)

Bias Soundsoap.

See the Bias site for details on Soundsoap.  It comes in multiple versions, from very cheap to not so cheap.  It comes with a lot of different audio editors, and even their very cheap “SE” product works great.  Bias’s Peak Express, by the way, is a great deal in a professional quality audio editor.

Sonnox DeNoiser.

See Sonnox for details on their DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive, but comes with Wavelab Elements, a very good deal in a high end wave editor.

Izotope RX 2 DeNoiser.

See Izotope for details on RX DeNoiser.  This one is pretty expensive.

More on this next time…