When creating content that features audio, one of the biggest problems is unwanted noise. Examples of this include background noise like wind or air conditioning, hissing, or even loud breathing. Microphones are sensitive and can pick up more than you can think. You may be in a situation where you have a killer interview recorded but there is a lot of background noise. While it is hard to eliminate all background noise from a recording, it is possible to tidy it up by cleaning audio. Let’s take a look at the importance of clean audio and some programs that can help!
Why Do I Need To Clean Audio?
Having messy, distracting audio can instantly put people off your content. Whether it’s a podcast, an interview or a video project, if people can’t hear what’s being said then what’s the point? During an interview, for example, at least 80% of the information from the video comes from the sound. So, audiences need to be able to understand it. There are tons of videos, tutorials, podcasts and so on out there. Don’t let audiences click away from your content because your audio is off-putting!
Cleaning Audio Using Audacity
Audacity is a great way to remove unwanted background noise when cleaning up your audio. Best of all – it’s free! Audacity cleans up audio alone, so it might not be the best option for audio from a video. There is other software that works with video but for podcasts or other audio only projects, Audacity works great!
To use it for cleaning audio, all you need to do is:
- Go to the Effect dropdown menu at the top
- Select ‘Noise Reduction’Click ‘Get Noise Profile’ and the box will disappear
- Select your audio clip(s) that you wanted to clean up by clicking
- Select and then ‘All’Go the menu again and select ‘Repeat Noise Reduction’
- Have a final listen to make sure your audio isn’t muffled
Top Tips
Here are some terms you will need and what they mean:
Sensitivity: This controls the range of what noise removal considers noise. The higher you go, the more that voices or actual audio will be affected.
Frequency Smoothing: The default setting is 3. Settings lower than this will favor music and higher settings work better for spoken word.
Reduce and residue buttons: Reduce will provide you with a preview. It plays what the audio will sound like with noise removed. To hear exactly what the noise reduction is taking out, select residue and click preview.
Cleaning Audio In Adobe Audition
Another option is cleaning your audio using Adobe Audition. This works better for video-based audio, and keeps everything all in one place.
To sum it all up nicely, check out this helpful tutorial video. This technique involves finding a part of the audio that doesn’t feature any speaking or specific audio and capturing the noise print. This will allow you to work on noise reduction and reducing volume in terms of decibels.
Cleaning Audio In Adobe After Effects
After Effects is our next video/audio option, and is simple to use. Here’s how:
- Select the clip you want to work on, right click and hit “Replace with After Effects Composition.” This will open up After Effects.
- Next, go to “Effects” and select “Remove Grain” Drag this onto your composition and go to the “Effects Controls” for the “Remove Grain” effect.
- Here, you’ll be able to increase the “de-noising” of the clip by increasing the “Passes”
- Once this is done, the composition will automatically sync in Premiere Pro, so you can continue editing. This effect is render-heavy so you might want to render out once you’ve done this.
Top Tips
Still having trouble playing the clip in Premiere Pro at the end of the above steps? Try exporting the clip from After Effects and bringing it back into Premiere.
How Audiosocket Can Help
If your main problem is that you have music that is muffled or low quality, then allow Audiosocket to step in. Our catalog of music is of the upmost quality, and won’t let you down. We have a wide range of over 80,000 tracks so you’ll surely find what you need for your content. Get started now!
