Podcast Sound Quality

[pingers]

Hi Gents,

Just making a suggestion that I think would be really easy to implement and improve sound quality up another notch. I know it's significantly better now than it used to be

I suggest running the noise removal filter in Audacity before encoding to ogg.
It's a really easy thing to do and takes about 2 mins on desktop machine.
All you have to do is:
1. Open the recording in Audacity (maybe you're using this to encode it? not sure)
2. Select a region of the recording with just background noise somewhere in the middle of the recording. (I.e. no major ups and downs - it's just "whitenoise")
3. Select Effect > Noise Removal...
4. Click on "Get Noise Profile" (popup then closes).
5. Select the entire recording (Ctrl + A)
6. Select Effect > Noise Removal...
7. Now click "OK".
8. Click File > Export and save a copy as an ogg.

Appreciate your hard work and effort!
Cheers from downunder!

[Gomer_X]

Wouldn't you have to do this over and over for every different type of background noise? For instance, if you isolate the sound of someone typing, that wouldn't remove the sound of someone yelling in the background, or fan noise. You'd need to do it for every noise.

That would at least require listening to the entire show from end to end. It would take hours of editing.

Good idea, though.

[NYbill]

Gomer_X, i think he means just take a baseline of the ambient background noise.

[dann]

I've tried this in the past and it destroys the audio. I will try again and see if the results are different.

[pingers]

@dann: Maybe you selected the entire clip, rather than just the baseline background noise. Let me know if you have troubles - willing to take you through it if you like.

@Gomer_X: It doesn't get rid of absolutely every pop, hiss and click, but it makes a huge jump in audio quality - especially for headphone/earphone listeners.