Balance woman speaking close to mic against man speaking far

Question

I have a lot of audio interview recorded on a smartphone where the interviewer is a woman holding the recorder and the subject is a man across a table. So the woman's voice is too loud and the man's is too quiet. (And there are many segments where the woman talks over the man.) Are there tools or tricks to balance this out?

(I tried a simple low-pass filter and that helped a tiny bit, but there are overlaps in the vocal frequencies, so I can't pick a filter frequency or crank it enough to make a significant difference without too much voice distortion on both speakers.)

Answer 1

You're going to hear lots of attempts at answering this question, but in reality the sad fact of the matter is that there is really nothing that you can realistically do to save this audio. I am assuming that this is just for transcription, because if it is for broadcast then you are really stuck.

Perhaps the only thing you can do is apply a compressor or limiter to the audio to settle the levels down.

Answer 2

not sure this can be done. Perhaps simply ask the person who provided the audio what is being said? I am sure they would be happy to tell you what was said. Unless they did not give it to you with their permission to use it. In which case, I see why you are going to such extremes to do it without just asking them