cleaning audio files

[Paul Trilsbeek]

Hi Nick, others,

We've used Adobe Audition and Soundbooth, I think their filters for broadband noise reduction are slightly better than the one in Audacity but you also get the 'wobbly' noises and robotic sounding voices depending on how many dB you're cutting the noise with. Quite possibly you would obtain better results with dedicated audio restoration tools such as the ones you mention or the WAVES plugins or CEDAR tools, I've heard the CEDAR stuff on a trade show several years ago and it sounded quite impressive but it also had an impressive price tag, not really justifiable for us for the odd noise removal job. The WAVES plugins as well as the SoundSoap tools are available as demo versions so you could try them before deciding on buying them. I would always only apply any such filtering on a copy for transcription purposes and keep the original as well for archiving.

Best regards,

Paul

On Feb 16, 2012, at 0:55 , Colleen Hattersley wrote:

> Hello All
> I've found that Audacity's 'noise removal' is good to a degree.  It also removes that frequency from the voice bits and if you're not careful your people sound like chipmunks and other 'wobbly' noises are picked up by earphones but not too noticeable if not using earphones.  I've found Sound Forge more effective - but also more time consuming (probably because I need to learn more about how Sound Forge works).
> Colleen Hattersley
> 
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Alex Francois <Alexandre.Francois at vjf.cnrs.fr> wrote:
> hi Nick,
> 
> the free software editor Audacity has a function called 'Noise removal'  (in its menu "Effect") which I've found useful.
> 
> best
> Alex
> 
>  
> -- 
> Dr Alex FRANÇOIS
> 
> LACITO - CNRS, France
> 
> 2009-2012:  Visiting Fellow
> 	Dept of Linguistics
> 	School of Culture, History and Language
> 	Australian National University
> 	ACT 0200, Australia
> 
> 	
> http://alex.francois.free.fr
> 
> On 16/02/2012 6:32 AM, Nick Thieberger wrote:
>> Does anyone have any experience of cleaning up constant noise or
>> particular recurrent noise in audio files? I'm thinking about using
>> either SoundSoap or SoundSoap Pro, but am interested to know of other
>> useful (and affordable) tools too.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Nick
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Colleen
>