Audacity: process audio recording

Question

I got an audio file and it was recorded too close to the mic, I can listen to some vibrations at the end of the words and with the 's'. I want to fix it using Audacity. What should I do?

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called de-essing.

While audacity has no de-essing effect built-in, there is a (cross-platform) de-esser plugin written in Audacity's embedded Nyquist language.

For the particular case of using it under Linux, the instructions are not very clear where to put plugins in a user-owned directory (they are clearer for a system-wide installation, which usually requires superuser privileges).

To use it with Linux, download the plugin file (which is an attachment to the post linked above), create a directory called .audacity-files/plug-ins under your home directory (notice the leading dot in the name of the directory) and move the plugin file under that directory.

The plugin will be available after you restart Audacity. It is a bit slow, but produces very nice results in my experience.

Answer 2

It's been a while sense I messed with this, but try compressing/normalizing the audio stream (should be an option in the Effect menu). That helps take peaks off the sound (like those that would come from air suddenly being blown into the mike or too loud spikes on some words). How much or how little you use will be up to you to play with.

Compressing clips the peaks after an allowed attack time and Normalizing brings up the rest if I remember correctly.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Along with compressing/normalizing, you can benefit from "de-essing". If I remember correctly, Audacity doesn't have a built-in de-esser, but you can mitgate the effect with equalization and/or Low-Pass filters.