Help EQing out train noise

Hi Kevin, try Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > DeNoise and set it to around 70% to hear the difference it makes.

The best idea would be, as you say, to re-record further away from road noise. Saying that the DeNoise effect seems to work pretty well on your sample.

It's also true that if you approach something like this correctly, you can get a good result even out of mediocre equipment. With the right front end (in my case, an omni mic, homebrewed parabolic reflector, homebrewed preamp optimised for its noise performance) I managed to make some pretty reasonable wildlife recordings on a Minidisc recorder, which was otherwise not that much to write home about!

Thanks for the response..  Yeah, I thought that this was a case where, "recorded in the file..ruined file.."

I even tried some extreme noise reduction, and of course just like you know, it sounded way too not natural

and had healthy does of artifacting.

Thanks for the confirmation!

This also proves my theory that, it does not matter if you have the most expensive equipment, if you are careless about your actual setting up in the field, you will get non-usable audio.

Kevin

Train and traffic noise is very difficult to get rid of completely without artifacts, especially when what you want to hear isn't that loud in the first place. Yes you can EQ out all the LF, but the result will still sound rather unnatural - if you see what I mean. So yes, get much further away from roads and traffic, and ideally do what everybody else does whilst doing this, and use a parabolic reflector with an omni mic. This makes the whole recording arrangement much more directional, which should help a lot.

I tried using NR on your sample, but it made very little difference to it - which is what I'd expect to happen with that sort of signal. The best way to deal with anything like this is at source - which means optimising your mic arrangements for what you want to record. The parabolic reflector is very directional, and you have to use headphones whilst using it to get it pointing accurately at the source, but generally it's worth it.

Parabolic reflectors for wildlife recording