Did you want to learn how to remove that pesty background noise and hiss from your recordings in Audacity? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Audacity is one of the best programs at removing noise and on top of that, it’s incredibly easy to do. Without wasting anymore of your precious time, lets dive right in.
Two Separate Recordings
The first thing you need to do is record two different recordings. The first one is going to be your original recording. This is the one you want to remove the noise from. The next thing you need to do, is record inside of audacity for about 5-10 seconds and don’t make any sounds. Make sure you are recording with the same microphone that you used in the original recording or this won’t work properly. The second recording we just made is so we can record the room noise and any noise that is coming from the microphone so we can create a noise profile.
Noise Reduction Plugin In Action
The next thing you’re going to do is highlight part of the audio from the second recording we made (the noise recording) and choose about 5-10 seconds of pure noise. Make sure you didn’t talk or bump into your desk. Once you have the audio highlighted, go into effects and scroll down until you see the effect called Noise Reduction. This is where the magic happens. Click on “Get Noise Profile” and hit cancel.
Finally, Removing That Dreaded Noise
Now that we have the noise profile, we can apply it to our original recording. Highlight your original recording (the one you want to remove noise from) and go back to effects and then click Noise Reduction. Here, you can adjust the settings if you want or just copy ours! We find that you really don’t want to remove much more than 10 dB of noise or you can start getting strange distortions to your audio. Once you have fine tuned your settings, just hit the “OK” button. That’s it! Depending on how long your audio recording is this may take some time. Don’t be worried if it takes more than 10 minutes. This is quite normal for longer audio recordings. We hope this solved that dreaded background noise issue. As you can see, it’s pretty easy to remove background noise in Audacity. Thanks for sticking around this long. Check out our other articles here.
