Audacity Tutorial #5 – Using the Noise Removal Tool

What I'm going to tell you about today is a great and free sound editor called Audacity, this outstanding piece of freeware allows its users record, slice and mix audio tracks thanks to its comprehensive list of tools and effects, this cross-platform digital audio editor and recording program features make of it a good alternative to other really expensive commercial products that most of the the time are extremely complex and difficult to learn and use. In this tutorial I'm about to show you how to remove room noise from your recordings using Audacity.

First of all you need to have Audacity installed and ready to run in your computer, otherwise, click the “Download” button above and get your free fully functional copy. Once you have it launch the installer, it will take car of the setup process.

Let's say you've recorded some sound and it has a lot of room noise in it and you want to remove or “clean” the recording from that noise, fortunately Audacity comes with a powerful tool to do that. So, open the audio file and the first thing you have to do is to identify a portion of the track that has this noise alone.

In general you'll be able to find this at the beginning of the track. And it will look like this:

Now that you have identified it, select this noise-only sector that will be a sample for the noise that must be removed from the entire recording. Go to Effect in the menu and select Noise Removal...

In the dialog that opens click the button under Step 1 “Get Noise Profile”

After that select the entire track and again go to Effect → Noise Removal... and in the dialog adjust the slider on Step 2 to the left like this:

Now just click the Remove Noise button and a progress bar will appear indicating that the effect is being applied.

Now you'll see that the first segment you selected looks flater and you'll notice the difference when you listen to the whole track.

You can also preview the removal by clicking the Preview button, this is really helpful to determine the exact amount of removal you have to use to get the best result.

Final Words

As you can see removing that annoying room noise is really easy and straight forward if you do it with audacity. Download Audacity now by clicking on the “Download Now” link below and start editing your audio tracks like a pro!!