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Can anyone guide me on howto remove the fan noise from this audio.

Kinda stuck here.

Here's a link to the file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fzggrj5zmviwfpj/fan_noise%26Hiss_audio.mp3?dl=0

Thanks

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  • possible duplicate of How can I cut out background noise from my footage? Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 15:52
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    It sounds either poorly recorded or encoded that's going to make the work much tougher, the voice already has lots of artifacts and noise reduction can make those worse. Isotope rx is the standard toolset. Try a demo and read their booklet. Multi band compression might be a good option to just pull the noise down but not affect the voice tone much.
    – coaxmw
    Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 17:34
  • youtu.be/TYF5ytMDFpA?t=143 Commented Dec 9, 2017 at 9:02

2 Answers 2

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Start with the highest resolution format that you have the recording in (mp3 is not ideal) - in reducing noise you are degrading the sound so you constantly have to question whether what you're doing is more damaging than what you have. ie. is the fan sound more annoying than noise reduction artefacts.

So anyway I had a go at reducing the noise:

Have a listen here

A good noise removal tool like RX4 will make the process more straightforward. For this example I pulled down some of the more prominent tonal bands of noise at about 480Hz, 740Hz and 1.2kHz. You can do this with an EQ or, more precisely with the RX spectral repair tool which will take into account transients and help to reduce damage to the voice.

You have a few gaps in which to take a noise sample so you can then use a de-noise tool to pull down some of the background noise. Use this very sparingly though as this can leave you with very tell tale musical sounding artefacts. I would normally tease out noise a couple of dB at a time (rather than the default 12dB) and just keep referring back to the original to see whether it's still an improvement.

You can try to push the voice with the deconstruct module - again maybe only 1 or 2 dB to help increase the relative volume of the voice against the noise.

Then finish off by scanning through for more prominent bands using an EQ (which you can reduce a little) and because the speaker has a higher pitched voice you can start rolling off your high pass filter from about 140-150Hz which helps to get rid of even more low end hum and noise.

It's still not a great result but for the quality of the file, the recording technique and the nature of the problem I wouldn't expect a miracle!

Hopefully this is in some way helpful though.

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  • Hey LenSound,Thanks for the elaborate response. This sounds so much better than what I currently have. I got access to Adobe Audition and I'm wondering if I can achieve this quality with it? Unfortunately I don't have RX.
    – Collie
    Commented Jul 3, 2015 at 6:51
  • Hi Collie, I'm not very familiar with Audition but I believe there is a noise-reduction function that would help you with the process I mentioned before. There is a tutorial here that may be helpful to you: link You can still reduce tonal noise with EQ and remove low-level noise with a gate. Good luck!
    – LenSound
    Commented Jul 3, 2015 at 10:06
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To solve problems with existing audio, best thing you can do is download Reaper. It is "free" to use (after 60 days it will start asking you if you want to buy, you can click continue). There's a plugin called "ReaFir" which has a subtractive mode where you let it loop over a selection of the audio that has the noise so it can profile it and then it pulls that out.

For future, on many laptops (sounds like you're on a laptop?) you can plug in your iphone/phone earbuds and it will use the inline mic from that. Or spend $30 on a cheap USB headset.

Here's your audio cleaned up with Reaper. (less than 2 minutes of work)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47254266/denoised.mp3

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