LinuxMusicians

A friend (recording engineer) tells me you should use a combination of several different noise reduction methods, each only taking it down a few dB, and never attempt complete removal.

I've been doing that with some degree of success, but I believe the result I used to get with that... erm, something I used a year ago (probably Audacity) was better.

Did you try deleting the audacity config files in your /home directory?

CraigPid wrote:Did you try deleting the audacity config files in your /home directory?

Yes, I've tried that, too.

Luc wrote:it's only source, no packages.

There's a binary for Windows. You could try running that with WINE. Latency is irrelevant here.

There's a new noise reduction plugin we've been talking about on the Ardour forum. I think it works at least as well as the Audacity noise reduction but it's used as a plugin so you don't have to export your tracks to Audacity.
https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-repellent
The Ardour forum thread is
https://community.ardour.org/node/6175

Noise-Repellent in Audacity:
https://servimg.com/view/12842335/61
Noise-Repellent in QTractor:
https://servimg.com/view/12842335/62

I have had luck using a downward expander as a noise reduction tool. With the right settings, it will kill all sound in the space between whats above the threshold, while noise is rarely heard during loud sound anyway. I once cleaned up an acoustic guitar recording almost completely this way, without damaging the high end.

/Frank

j_e_f_f_g wrote:

Luc wrote:it's only source, no packages.

There's a binary for Windows. You could try running that with WINE. Latency is irrelevant here.

This is a very good idea.

Virtual machine with a small distro like puppy running audacity?

Aeons ago I used Gnome Wave Cleaner. It's much better than Audacity, but it got old and I don't think it's actively developed anymore. I'm not even sure it still compiles on my Gentoo, but there should be a Debian package (look for "gwc").
It's not a plug-in, though, but a stand-alone program (and not even jack-ified).

Yes, GWC is available on the Debian repository! And it looks kind of cool. I've been too busy, but will take it for a spin ASAP.

Thank you!

Hi! GWC is so old and unmaintained that it will probably crash rapidly. It did when I tried to use it. There are two serious options Audacity if you like the audio editor workflow or noise-repellent if you like the plugin workflow. Both of them will get you there. Audacity denoiser is really good but it need lots and lots of tweaking and won't provide rapid results and for the case of noise repellent results can be achieved much quickly (shameless promotion here haha ).

I have used Noise repellent, RNNoise (noise suppression), Bertom Denoiser, even now Audacity, etc., for audio projects that required noise reduction. These mentioned tools are cross-platform too.

This post may be updated overtime to make it easier for viewers to find more updates for FLOSS noise reduction technology

• Noise repellent by Luciano Dato is similar to any de-noise plugin on the audio plugin market (Z-noise, RX Denoise, etc) that helps remove unwanted back ground noise. Earlier versions had the learn noise button to capture the noise you are trying to remove a certain frequency range and now the plugin as of recent has been revamped. I haven’t tried the latest version yet but supposedly the result are pretty good from users.

https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-re ... tag/v0.2.3

• RNNoise is an automated plugin that tames all background noise from the desired audio. When I used the version from two years ago, minimal (but noticeable) background noise was reduced very well so this can be helpful. Although there are newer versions of it, it had no perimeters to tweak any settings as it is a plug-and-play plugin.

https://github.com/werman/noise-suppres ... e/releases

• Bertom Denoiser is like a noise gate / variable sweeping graphic eq that tams down several specific frequency bands you need noise suppressed. The different frequency faders can change with the wheel button which will change the frequencies of all fader bands when done so find out what frequencies have unwanted noise. Best to use EQ for this first to sweep those noisy parts if you can and then use noise reduction to get best results. Faders also have a stereo link control feature button so all faders move and the same time to control the threshold entirely

https://bertom.gumroad.com/l/denoiser

• Audacity as of version 3.2.3, has a built-in plugin called Noise Reduction and you can somewhat now edit in the spectrogram view.

• The Noise Reduction plugin has a "Get Noise Profile" feature founded in many high end, audio software, that copies the signal noise you want to reduce. After doing some tests on it, the results for me were quite remarkable! It's amazing how far open-sourced audio software has benefitted from this, and as a result is creating more advanced features that are typically in close-source software. Go Audacity!
• You can edit in the spectrogram after click the down arrow on a track's left box above the gain slider and view the "Spectrogram" than the waveform. You can edit parts of the spectrogram in a box shape only for now which has it's limitations, but regardless is very cool. iZotope RX is famous for both its noise reduction and spectrogram editing technology, and audacity getting started to implement this is incredible. Even the most basic noise reduction tools are the main tools for editing audio professionally. Go Audacity Team!