Decreasing volume of breaths in a podcast without completely removing them

Question

The guest's audio track has really loud and unpleasant breathing in sounds, so I want to decrease the volume but not remove them completely, as my concern is that removing breaths completely, it would make the guest sound like a robot.

Here's a short sample: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rltnu8d6w9ken7/Podcast%203.mp3?dl=0

It's 90 minutes long recording, so I would prefer not doing this manually but rather using an effect that can do this for me for the whole recording (even if it's not perfect).

I can't find a solution on YouTube so hopefully, there is someone that can point me in the right direction here. Thanks!

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

You're correct about not wanting to get rid of them completely, even though they are, indeed, pretty intrusive!

I tried this using Dynamics Processing set up as a gate, but since the breaths are nearly at the same level as the wanted speech, this simply isn't going to work. The most success I had was with the Sound Remover tool. I sampled one of the mid-range breaths (not the first one in your file - that was too loud) and with a bit of rearrangement of the adjustments available, I got a reasonable degree of reduction of the noise, although it's inevitable that some of it will remain, I'm afraid - those breaths aren't 100% identical.

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