Software to separate noise from the human voice or song

Hi there
Noise distortion usually occurs because the original recording or playback (or both) level(s) was set too high -- an error often made by Amateur Musicians or those people used to playing in noisy venues (outside in the open etc).

Sound waves are a series of Sine waves - and when the volume gets too high the top gets clipped transforming them from a nice sine wave into a sort of trapezoidal one which gives you the distortion -- as @ignatzatsonic says there's nothing you can really do about that as well as the file being .mp3 is itself compressed and will have a load of artifacts in it anyway.

Some sort of rescue might be possible if you get the volume down to the lowest possible while doing the edit but unlike say scratches and clicks on old Vinyl records which can be removed with some success --or cleaned up quite nicely I think your only bet is to try and get another copy of the input file recorded at much lower volume.

Those old "VU meters" on recording gear were there for a purpose !!!!!

Cheers
jimbo

I sent the link to the audio file in my previous post. Did you note it, please?

Would extracting and then exporting the audio file in some different format than .mp3 help to be understood better? If so, what format do you suggest/

tomyfr said:

I sent the link to the audio file in my previous post. Did you note it, please?

Would exporting the audio file in some different format than .mp3 help to be understood better? If so, what format do you suggest/

I cannot play your .mp3 file at all. It appears to be defective in some way.

WAV format is usually the preferred format, BUT if your original file is an mp3, then converting that to WAV isn't going to help in most cases. MP3 files are compressed and a WAV made from an mp3 is just going to be a perfect (lossless) copy of that compressed file. But it can't hurt to experiment with a WAV version.

If your original file is a significantly distorted mp3, you need to lower your expectations or find an improved copy of the file.

You can try converting your mp3 to WAV and then uploading the WAV into this thread. Maybe that will be playable.

ignatzatsonic said:

I cannot play your .mp3 file at all. It appears to be defective in some way.

WAV format is usually the preferred format, BUT if your original file is an mp3, then converting that to WAV isn't going to help in most cases. MP3 files are compressed and a WAV made from an mp3 is just going to be a perfect (lossless) copy of that compressed file. But it can't hurt to experiment with a WAV version.

If your original file is a significantly distorted mp3, you need to lower your expectations or find an improved copy of the file.

Hi there
FLAC -- even better --still uncompressed but much smaller file sizes --however we get your point -- -it's been true ever since the ist computer appeared --GIGO -- Garbage In Garbage out. Same with sound - if the source file is rubbish then there's not much (if anything) you can do to rescue it.

Cheers
jimbo

The original file is a video with .avi format.
I'm going to extract its audio with the ffmpeg tool and apply Noise Reduction 10 to see the difference.

tomyfr said:

The original file is a video with .avi format.
I'm going to extract its audio with the ffmpeg tool and apply Noise Reduction 10 to see the difference.

Hi there

Strangely enough the eye is more tolerant of Artifacts than the Ear -- that's why you can still often tolerate some of those early 1940's / 1950's black and white movies from Hollywood's classical movie making period on a large 55 inch plasma TV display without too many horrors after people have ripped them to around 2 GB size files and uploaded to places like that venerable site still flying The Skull and Crossbones!

The brain is very good at inserting missing pixels and helping the usually quite reasonable hardware systems for "Up-rezzing" images.

Unfortunately that fails to work for sound -- good luck if you can get anything sensible - but I think the audio on your file is under any circumstances unplayable !!!.

If you do get any sort of sensible sound - KEEP THE VOLUME DOWN -- you can always increase the gain after you've cleaned the file -- !!!!! AVI still works BTW as a video format -- however these days much better to use MKV / MP4 or even better HEVC 265.

Cheers
jimbo

Well, thanks so much for you all and your time.

The videos aren't mine and I need to do what I can so that they have better voice quality.

As the last point for the issue, apart from the .WAV extension and Noise Reduction 10 could the following features, if applied without any modification to their default settings and just by hitting their OK buttons, have any improving impact on the voice quality? (even a tiny impact)

Effect -> Amplify
Effect -> distortion
Effect -> Normalize
Effect -> Repair

tomyfr said:

Well, thanks so much for you all and your time.

The videos aren't mine and I need to do what I can so that they have better voice quality.

As the last point for the issue, apart from the .WAV extension and Noise Reduction 10 could the following features, if applied without any modification to their default settings and just by hitting their OK buttons, have any improving impact on the voice quality? (even a tiny impact)

Effect -> Amplify
Effect -> distortion
Effect -> Normalize
Effect -> Repair

Repair: no; it is intended to repair ONLY very short segments, measured in thousandths of a second.

Normalize and Amplify both relate to volume and aren't likely to help you at all.

Distortion: I've never used it, but you might play with it a bit. But the fact is that your best original version is distorted and that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to change.

It's like trying to uncook a hamburger. Or making the silk purse out of the sow's ear.

It's very hard to overcome poor conditions and bad recording technique---microphone quality and placement, poor level control, background noise, rooms subject to echo, mumbling speakers with bad diction, cheap hardware, low bitrates, low quality tape, etc.

Your best bets are to try equalization and low or high pass filters, but you aren't likely to have much luck with them on ordinary distortion.

Ahh. Unfortunately the only remedy for the problem is Equalization. the extracted (.WAV) audio file has distortion and the voice fluctuates like a wave at times and I know it makes the case worse!

Now if the Equalization is the way to go, unfortunately it's hard for me because its the first time I'm dealing with this dialog:



Some major modifications for this window is simple language based on the circumstaces I described for the voice will be helpful very much.

Poke the "graphic" choice.

That will reveal a bunch of sliders that you can move around with the mouse.

Experiment with various sliders, up and down, and hope for the best.

Don't expect much.

The effect will be quite obvious, but it isn't likely to affect distortion, which is what you claim is the problem.

But it might help improve other qualities--and it won't hurt. You can always cancel the equalization and go back to your original file.

I would copy your original to another folder and then use Audacity on the copy---so that your original remains intact and unaffected in case you do something wrong.