Freesound Forums

Hey, do you know how I'd do noise removal in audacity as a step-by-step, because nothing I do seems to fix it.

Never mind, I fixed it.

Well, please, help everyone else here that you just asked for help by telling us how you did it.

1. record 5-10 seconds of complete silence

2. in audacity select only the 5-10 seconds of silence and go to Effects>Noise Removal

3. Click "Get Noise Profile"

4. select the whole audio clip and go to Effects>Noise Removal again

5. set Noise Reduction to 24, set Sensitivity to -5.00, set frequency smoothing all the way to 1000, set Attack/Decay time all the way down to 0, pick Remove not Isolate

6. Click the Preview button, if you still hear noise then turn up the sensitivity or Noise Reduction, once you hear nothing, click OK

Noise removal in audacity is a tool to help remove background noise from recordingds.

Lets say you did an interview of people in the street. Now you re listeningt to your recording and you find that there is quite a lot of traffic noise and you want to remove it.

In your recording you must find a section that contains only the noise you want to remove. In my example, this would be a section of the recording without dialogue and with the background traffic noise.
Select this section and then choose Noise Removal -> Get Noise Profile
Then select the whole recording and do Remove Noise.
The default settings generally work pretty well.

The best way of learning what the different settings do is by experimenting.

Noise removal is a spectral effect (converts the sound to a frequency spectrum, analyzes it and then attenuates the frequencies you have selected as noise).
To an extent, the process is similar to encoding a sound as mp3 and, if you push the attenuation too hard, you can get artefacts similar to those found on mp3 and other compressed audio formats.
Too much attenuation on speech can also make the "s", "t", "p" and other consonants sound odd.

Kodack wrote:
1. record 5-10 seconds of complete silence

2. in audacity select only the 5-10 seconds of silence and go to Effects>Noise Removal

3. Click "Get Noise Profile"

4. select the whole audio clip and go to Effects>Noise Removal again

5. set Noise Reduction to 24, set Sensitivity to -5.00, set frequency smoothing all the way to 1000, set Attack/Decay time all the way down to 0, pick Remove not Isolate

6. Click the Preview button, if you still hear noise then turn up the sensitivity or Noise Reduction, once you hear nothing, click OK

Up Up Up