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Participant
September 25, 2019
Question

Vocal track overlap issue

  • September 25, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 487 views

Hello! Sorry if this is a common question, I had trouble trying to find an answer when googling and looking over the forums because it's difficult to phrase what I'm looking for.

 

Sorry that this is a bit complicated. I have three recordings of the same conversation which is about two hours long.

 

One is pristine clear audio of four people.

 

Another is a web call recording of a fifth person with tinny web call quality.

 

The third is clear audio of that fifth person with audio of the other four people at reduced web quality overlapping it.

 

What we are looking at now is manually cutting between tracks every time the four people talk "over" the person who accidentally recorded them on their track. I was wondering if there was some way to automate the process or get the audio from the other call to at least partially cancel out the accidental recording since it's the exact same conversation. I know it's foolish to expect to separate out one human voice from another when you have one track onhand, but I was wondering if having all these versions of the same conversation could help with removal and I don't know how much the varying quality of the tracks would hurt that opportunity. Thanks very much for any help/advice! And I understand if this is not possible and we just have to do it manually, but I figured I would look for help before committing to that. Thanks!!

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1 reply

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 25, 2019

To get cancellation to work, the tracks have to be absolutely identical (sample-accurate) in order to isolate a component that way. The only thing you might be able to do is to use a noise gate on the track of the fifth person, if indeed the web quality recording is quieter than the wanted voice - if it isn't, then this won't work either - you need clear level distinctions if you aren't going to cut off words. I'm afraid that almost invariably, the manual cleanup option works best - you can't beat a pair of ears to tell you what to do, and Audition doesn't have a pair itself...