Can't seem to find a way to reduce ac noise and smooth vocal sound properly, please help!

Report · May 24, 2022

Hi everyone,

I've only recently picked up podcast recording (we typically do livestreaming and video recording) So please excuse my novoice question. I have searched and tried a few solutions provided but haven't seem to find the best fix for my situation.

Our studio has adaquate noise dempening equipment, but recently AC in the building has been ramping up as summer approaches, and making cleaning up the audio very difficult. This hasn't seem to be an issue with video recordings since part of the audience's attention is distracted by the visuals, but with audio alone, it sounds like you are standing by the beach with waves crashing into your eardrums.

In this particular case, I have two people in the studio recordin an interview. Towards the end of the session, I failed to remind them to maintain proper distance with the microphone when the AC kicked on, one person sat too far back, and caused the microphone to take in A LOT of the AC noise in the background of her speech. I've wasted hours trying to clean it up and I'm truly at my wits end. Please help! Thank you.

ALso if you have any suggestions as to how I can reduce noise coming from an overhead AC vent with hardware, I'd love to hear them, thank you again!

Report · May 24, 2022

One of the reasons that you will have some difficulty with the AC noise is because it's modulated, so it goes up and down in level with speech. Ideally you need an original, uncompressed (in fact not treated at all) version of this recording that isn't an MP3 but a wave file. Then it will be relatively easy to get rid of most of the AC noise. NR only really works well on constant noise sources. You could try the Adaptive version of NR which is supposed to be able to cope with these sorts of changes better, but overall, the results never sound as good.

The other thing to note is that with any NR, doing several passes and taking a smaller amount off at each one always works better. So in general does raising the FFT size, unless it's very low frequency noise.

Report · May 26, 2022

Thank you Steve,

Yes the file I'm editing is in WAV format, I just exported a mp3 clip to show the sounds.

I have read that suggestion that you gave in others' posts and when I tried to remove noise, eventually they start sounding echoy. Obviously, I have learnt from my mistakes and now I'm more diligent with recording and eliminating noise at the source. But I do have a few jobs that can not be re-recorded and I want to figure out a way to make it sound as smooth as possible. Is there any other tools of software that might help? I can't afford iZotope yet unfortunately.

Report · May 26, 2022

There are a number of tools coming to market that use machine learning to improve these situations.

Note, that at the point from 1:04 onwards we lose a bit of bass in the voice.

Best regards, Euan.

Report · May 27, 2022

Clarity VX is pretty good at cleaning up noise in this kind of situation, and the cost is reasonable.

It's been getting good reviews.