Help with cleaning up an audio recording?

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Offline the Jack

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Help with cleaning up an audio recording?
« on: August 10, 2014, 05:41:09 »
So I have managed to record a sound effect I want to use in a KS level I'm working on. I'm using Audacity, and I am somewhere lower than 'noob' in terms of knowing what I'm doing. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to get Audacity to record anything at all.)

I have my recording trimmed to the relevant section, with a little lead-in and lead-out to avoid the overly-abrupt sound-cutting-out thing. I also figured out how to fade in and out the beginning and end of the sample, so that will help with the too-abrupt-transition thing.

The problem is, there's an awful low-pitched buzzing background noise that I suspect came from the mic itself (even though it's supposedly a good mic; we got it as a gift) which almost overpowers the sound I was actually trying to record. I've been able to silence it where it didn't overlap with the sound effect, but I'm having a really hard time isolating the part closest to where my sound begins in order to quiet the buzzing there.

I'd thought I'd be able to zoom way in and identify which sounds were which by their waveforms, but it turns out I am not as good at that as I thought I'd be. It doesn't help that the clip is very short, and the section with the actual sound effect is even shorter.

Any and all suggestions for filtering out or otherwise removing the obnoxious buzzing would be greatly appreciated.

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Offline sergiocornaga

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Re: Help with cleaning up an audio recording?
« Reply #1 on: August 10, 2014, 11:35:05 »
Audacity has a built-in feature for addressing issues like this! Let me know if after reading through that you still run into any issues and I'll try to offer more help.

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Offline LPChip

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Re: Help with cleaning up an audio recording?
« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2014, 12:19:46 »
I always use this method with Wavosaur. It is similar to what sergiocornaga suggests. Also the higher you set the bitrate, the more precise the cleanup will be. You can even use this on real audio streams, but then the higher the bitrate, the more delay there will be. Doing it once on a sample should not be a problem though.

http://www.wavosaur.com/tutorials/how-to-remove-noise.php
« Last Edit: August 10, 2014, 12:21:37 by LPChip »
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