Noise suppression in Ardour

[Neu1986]

Hi, I am trying to achieve a better noise suppression using Ardour in AVLinux. I have the three Monotron series pocket synthesizers connected to the input of the sound card with a normal unbalanced jack. The problem is, these synths are very noisy and the noise comes from the circuitry of the synth itself.

What I have been trying until now is the classic gating or "companding" (thus different from suppression) with decent results, except that there is some unwanted mess in the transition between signal and noise, when the gate starts to work. Nothing that makes the synths impossible to play, but I would like to improve the sound quality.

I was wondering if there is some plugin or technique allowing to completely remove the noise from the signal instead of gating or companding. I was thinking of a white noise inverted phase signal to achieve something similar to the active noise reduction, but I don't know if there is a way to do it.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you

[GMaq]

Hi,

There is source code for a great LV2 realtime noise suppression plugin here: https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-repellent

It isn't packaged anywhere yet but to my knowledge AV Linux has all the build dependencies included if you're handy with a compiler, if not reply here and I'll try and help you out..

[ufug]

There is a noise reduction tool in Audacity that does exactly this. It's not perfect, but it is easy to use and not bad at all.

[Neu1986]

Thank you guys. I forgot to specify that I need something that does the job live and not on a recorded track. It seems that the Noise Repellent is good for live reduction, while as far as I know the Ardour feature is available only for recorded tracks, is that correct?

[ssj71]

from what I understand noise repellent just needs to learn the noise, so if you set up the track so the plugin is processing the incoming audio, have it learn when the synths are just plugged in, and it should work. I haven't tried it myself, but its worth a shot.

[singforme]

If you want to use it live, I'd try a cheap gate guitar pedal (often a used multi-FX Pedal will do the job - it's probably only mono though.