As such, make sure that the recording is as good as you can get it (refer to the workshop on Getting Good (Enough) Audio Recording for a more detailed discussion).įor the workshop, I focused on Audacity as: 1) it’s free! and 2) it’s cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux, and Chromebook). when the audio file is clipped) or isolate tracks from loud background noise (e.g.

For example, you can’t put back data you don’t have (e.g. Before Cleaning and Editingīefore getting started on audio editing, it is important to keep in mind that there is only so much you can do to salvage, clean, and/or edit a badly recorded audio file. If you have questions about the post, please feel free to reach out via the Sound Studies commons group or through setting up a consultation session with the GC Digital Fellows. For those who might be considering sound projects but were not able to participate in the previous workshops, I hope this post will be useful to you as I recap some of the key applications of Audacity from the workshop. This workshop comes after my Fall workshop on Getting Good (Enough) Audio Recording. One solution, suggested by some users, is to have several programmable macro plugins that could be called upon in different situations.A couple of weeks ago, I ran a workshop on the Basics of Audio Editing with Audacity. If the new version of Audacity is aiming for full digital audio workstation (DAW) functionality it wouldn’t be too difficult to automate this area. This will progressively remove the noise, as long as you can find a section with just that noise. You can then repeatedly click ‘noise reduction’.

Within the app itself noise removal and repair allows you to clean up audio by selecting a piece with only the noise you want removed to get the ‘noise profile’. This only works for spoken-word recording, however. The ‘get more effects’ for noise removal and repair takes you to NVIDIA Broadcast which only works on Windows machines with a NVIDIA RTX GPU.

Good clean-up tools, which show potential for automation.

Noise Reduction takes out unwanted background, as long as you can separate it (Image credit: Audacity)

Audacity for beginners 2021