In an audio recording of a lecture, can I reduce the volume of my typing while preserving the volume of the lecture?

Question

I'm playing around with using OneNote 2013 to record some of my lectures. I really like the feature that links the time I wrote each paragraph in my notes with the time in the recording. However, the sound of me typing is much louder than the recorded voice in the lecture. I've tried to type as softly as I can, but it's still quite loud.

I'm sure this is unavoidable on some level--my microphone and keyboard are both part of my laptop, so of course the sound of the keyboard will be loud. But is there a way to edit the recording to reduce this sound?

Edit: I'm also open to alternative solutions, like buying a tiny microphone to attach my laptop, if it would reduce the sound.

Answer 1

Your best bet is definitely buying a microphone. Any attempt to reduce the volume of typing is going to be clunky at best.

There's probably no magic bullet when it comes to reducing the noise, but you could try using a very granular equalizer (32 channels or so) and reducing each band until you find the ones that contain the most keyboard noise. Running a desser or two might help if you can widen the frequency band enough to actually catch the parts of the keyboard noise you can't get to with the equalizer.

Answer 2

The mVox USB Speakerphone might work well for that. I haven't used it, but it's cheap, and the reviews are good.

From a review:

[The] miniVox MV100 portable USB speakerphone is a full duplex speaker phone (110dB peak volume) with DSP voice processing for noise suppression and echo cancellation. The miniVox MV100 portable USB speakerphone sounds better when I use it with Skype than my expensive Nortel Networks speaker phone on my companies PBX. It is USB plug and play and no driver installation is needed.

The voice Digital Signal Processing (DSP), echo cancellation, and noise suppression are exactly what you need for that kind of envirement.