Advanced noise reduction in Audition
 

Hi,

I've just recorded a whole slueth of narrartion using my wireless lapel mic, becuase I find it's easier for me to get a natural sounding voice when I'm free to walk around. Obviously, this wasn't the best choice (I also have a boom which was working much better for me earlier), but I'm wondering whether or not it's slavageable.

There's a very significant amount of background noise, and Audition has always saved me in the past, but it seems to just be trashing my clip when I try a noise reduction. I've gotten a clean sample of background noise for the reduction profile, but if I set the noise reduction to anything below 50% or so, it really doesn't help much. When I start to go above 50 though, I get really strange sounding artificants, including pre-echos. All of the highs in my voice are also gone, and I tried bringing them back with the graphic equalizer, but that didn't help much.

Basically my question is this: is there any way, you think, to salvage my voice? Because it's certainly in there - it's very strong, the noise reduction is just wiping it all out. There are a lot of settings in the noise reduction dialog box which I individually fiddeled with, but I couldn't hear any difference (except in amplitude, which isn't what I wanted, though).

Here's the orignial clip: [ link ] (3.1MB wav file)
Here's what I got from it: [ link ] (2.9MB wav file)
And here's the capture profile I used: [ link] (1.1MB fft file)

(This is just a random section of me talking, btw - I wasn't thinking about what I said so it's pretty random. And sorry about the big file sizes - I was a little concerned with compressing it, since a clear file probably matters)

I'm not asking for someone to just magically fix this clip for me (there are dozens more, actually). I'd just like to know

• Is it possible to salvage?
• If so, how? Stock Audition settings? Purchase an extension?

I don't have a lot of sound editing experience so I'm just having difficulty judging whether this is something worth devoting time to or if it should be thrown away.

Thanks very much. :)

Noise Reduction
 

Are you using Audition 2.0?
If so you can apply a curve to the noise reduction profile that should allow you to keep the vocals (1kHz) and kill the noise without too much damage.
After you wash the noise out normalize the track and see what is left, you might want to take another pass with the noise reduction filter with a new profile. Don't know how much this helps but its my two cents (1.8 Canadian).

Devlyn,

Thanks. No, I'm using 1.5, but I'll consider the upgrade since it's only $129.

Allen, my SoundSoap ($99) program had no trouble removing the noise cleanly. No surprise there-SoundSoap is a specialist.

But your sample is such a straightforward example of garden variety broadband noise that Audacity's noise reduction plugin had no trouble with it either. Audacity is a free sound editing program.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
I used the 1.2.4b, not the beta version