
If I can remove them from everybody’s audio track, you won’t get distracted when the character of the audio changes dramatically every time someone else starts talking. Even when someone’s talking, there are natural pauses through which the hums and noise can bleed through. The value in removing noise isn’t making the quiet parts quiet-it’s making it so that the parts in which your panelists are talking don’t also contain hums and other background noise.
#IZOTOPE VS SOUNDSOAP PRO#
Whether you use a noise gate or a Strip Silence feature like Logic Pro or Ferrite ( that’s my approach), quiet portions of someone’s audio tracks are automatically squelched. In truth, most of the “silent” portions of my guest’s audio tracks aren’t ever heard by podcast listeners.

This “silent” part of the track is now truly silent. Then I select the entire track (or the portion of it containing the noise I want to remove) and click Process to remove the noise.Īs you can see from the image below, the area I processed shows up with the thinnest of waveform lines and appears largely black, with no overlaid orange speckles indicating noise. That’s why I’ll now select a portion of audio and click Learn on the De-noise window. While removing the background hum is a major part of the noise-removal puzzle, there’s still other background noise. As you can see in the image below, after I click Process the two orange bars at the bottom of the waveform have vanished from the selected portion of the audio file. Then I select the entire track (or at least the portion of the track that contains the hum) and click Process to remove the hum from the selected area. To remove the hum, I select a portion of the audio that contains the hum and click the Learn button in the De-hum window. Most de-noising plug-ins will take care of background hums, but iZotope RX 5 offers a separate de-hum plug-in that is especially effective at destroying those hums. Those solid bars are background hums-they sit at specific frequencies and just keep on making noise. That’s most visible across the bottom of the screen. IZotope RX 5 also provides a second way of visualizing audio, which is via an orange-tinted interface that indicates noises at specific frequencies. (There’s also a big empty gap in the middle that’s when David muted his microphone entirely.) From the waveform, you can already tell this is a noisy track: The big spikes are when David is talking, but when he’s not talking there’s still a pretty thick line. Loehr, which may have actually been recorded in a hotel room, not his usual location. We’ll start with a particularly noisy track from my pal David J. As for me, for the last year or so I’ve been using the $249 iZotope RX 5, which is a combination of audio utilities that let you de-noise, de-hum, and de-reverb audio. Adobe includes a de-noising effect with its audio-editing app Audition.

#IZOTOPE VS SOUNDSOAP FREE#
If you’d like to try this out, consider Audacity, which is free and offers a de-noising plug-in. In that moment of personal silence, the recording is pure noise: the whirr of a laptop fan, the buzz of a heater, and the hiss of a microphone that does a very good job of picking up room noise.
#IZOTOPE VS SOUNDSOAP SOFTWARE#
Most of them work the same way: you “train” the software on a portion of the audio that contains only the noise you want to remove, which is generally a moment when your subject isn’t talking. And I do think getting the noises out improves my podcasts.Īnyway, there’s a lot of software out there that will let you remove noise from your podcasts. (Also, in most cases the best long-term solution is to get your panelists to improve their equipment or technique, not to fix it in post.) In fact, there are times when I wonder if all the work I put into the removal of noise from audio files is something listeners even notice. This sort of stuff isn’t for everybody-you don’t need to buy expensive software and spend a half an hour or longer processing all of your audio files in order to make a good podcast.

As a result, I spend a lot of time (and have spent more money than I’d expected) trying to remove noise from people’s audio files. My goal is to make everyone sound as good as possible for the benefit of the listener-and eliminate telltale background noises that would come and go as different people speak. I produce podcasts featuring different people using different microphones in all sorts of different homes, which is to say that the nature of the sound files I receive from my panelists can vary widely. Note: This story has not been updated for several years. Removing podcast room noise, hum, and echo
