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wring123
Participating Frequently
January 28, 2021
Question

Can't get rid of the hum- usual solutions not working

  • January 28, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 465 views

Hi Folks,   

 

I cannot get rid of the hum in a section of my audio. It's a regular cycle like 60 Hz but nothing gets rid of it. I tried De-Hum at different frequencies with varying number of harmonics, also  noise reduction.  I tried to find the problem frequency using the parametric equalizer.   Does anyone have suggestions?  I've attached a sample.   

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2 replies

EuanWilliamson
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 28, 2021

Yes, @SteveG_AudioMasters_  is absolutely correct 🙂

I should have zoomed in even further !!

 

You can always give it a quick try. It seemed a quick way to get some of the way to something useful.

Your ears may disagree 🙂

 

Best regards, Euan.
EuanWilliamson
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 28, 2021

Hi,

I had a look an it seems that the noise is more broad spectrum than a mains hum.

The frequency analysis of a "noise" section between words shows:

So as its voice, we can use the FFT to cut off anything outwith the vocal range of approx. 100- 10khz

 

Then we run the Sound Remover effect at aggressive levels having chosen one of the "noises" between words.

The green arrows point the clean up produced.

 

Lastly you'll need to tweak these levels in the sound removal to balance between clean up

and artifacts introduced into the voice.

 

Hope this helps 🙂

 

Best regards, Euan.
SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 28, 2021

A correct analysus of what you have there shows that it isn't actually hum - it's bursts of full spectrum noise repeated at 60Hz intervals (which is why it sounds like hum), but those bursts occupy the entire audio spectrum. They look like this (I've put a red ring around one of them):

In principle you should be able to create a sound removal pattern for them, but in practice you can't because a single cycle of this is far too short to be used as a pattern, whatever you do with the FFT setting. If you use a larger sample, you end up including speech wherever the effect is applied, and that's what puts the artifacts in.

 

On a very short section of this, just to prove it was possible to remove it without artifacts, I highlighted individual spikes and applied Auto Heal to them. This works quite well, but I'm not aware that there's any way to automate this. You can assign a keystroke to it, but you still have to select each spike manually. It's a bit frustrating - there's a workable cure for this, but no way of applying it sensibly! 

 

But this is why no amount of hum reduction, or any amount of playing with harmonics or noise reduction will work. Specifically, the noise reduction and sound removal won't work because you can't use a sample that short, and the harmonic filtering won't, because there are no harmonics - just bursts of noise.