- In this brief tutorial,
I'm gonna show you how to remove background noise in Audacity. (upbeat music) Background noise can be a real downer especially when you have
this fantastic interview that you wanna keep and cherish and share with your listeners but then the air conditioning
was on the background, there was a fan that was
picking up in the microphone, your neighbor started mowing the lawn. Whatever it is, there's some
kind of background noise that's really distracting
and you wanna get rid of it. I'm gonna show you how
to do that in Audacity. So I've gone ahead and
brought in an audio file that you can see has a good
bit of background noise. That's what all this is. All this is a hum that was
captured while I was recording. So the first thing you're gonna do is help Audacity isolate
that background noise. Make sure that you have
a recorded selection where there's absolutely no one talking, it's just the background noise. If you don't have a selection this big, you just wanna find
somewhere in that audio where you can isolate it. You're gonna make a selection
using your selection tool, go up to Effect and then Noise Reduction. So here, the first step is you're gonna click Get Noise Profile, and this again, just lets
Audacity know what to filter out, so it'll keep all the voices, it'll keep all the audio recordings and remove the background noise. So now Audacity has identified
those particular frequencies that you wanna remove so I'm
gonna select the entire track 'cause I want it removed from this track, go back to Effect and click
Noise Reduction again, and now I'm actually
going to remove the noise. So the first option that you have is the amount of noise reduction that you want Audacity to take out. You don't wanna overdo it because it might make your audio sound like you're recording underwater, but 12 decibels is a nice place to start. These second two options, sensitivity and frequency smoothing bands, I would leave these as
their default settings of six and three. They essentially just give
you a couple more levers to pull from to isolate the
noise frequency and reduce it, but you'll wanna start with the default 'cause if you get too in the weeds of trying to fine-tune these, you might actually end
up with something worse than what you started with, which is definitely not the goal. So you can preview what your
audio is gonna sound like with these settings applied and if it doesn't reduce them enough, then you can increase this noise reduction by going to 13, 14, 15, 20, 30 decibels, whatever you think is appropriate, previewing it again, continuing to do that until you feel like it's
in a really good spot, and then click OK. So now you can see Audacity
removed most of that noise but there's still a little bit left. So if I want to undo that, just hit Control + Z or
Command + Z on my keyboard, I can go back to the Effect,
click on Noise Reduction, and now let's increase this to
15 instead of 12 and hit OK. So now it's basically
completely removed it, so that's the give-and-take where you really wanna try
the default settings first, see how it does and then
if you need to apply more. But you wanna apply just
enough to remove the noise without impacting the rest of your audio. Now if you wanna learn even more about how to edit your podcast episodes in Audacity, from applying compression using fades to fine tuning your volume and cutting out tracks
and moving them around, then I would encourage you to check out our Audacity tutorial playlist
here on our YouTube channel. I'll leave a link in the description below so you can click and check that out. And if you're new here, I wanna encourage you to subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel. Every single week, we put
out new gear review videos, podcast strategy videos, and software tutorials like
the one you just watched to really help you on
your podcasting journey. Well thanks for watching, and until next time, keep podcasting. (upbeat music)
