Noise Reduction

[get2sammyb]

I have a copy of Cool Edit Pro 2.0 and was wondering on the best way to make use of my to use Noise Reduction.

I have a very b/g noisey guitar tracks, and when I try editing out the noise it sounds kind of underwater and ringy (I am only using the noise reduction amount on 5)...

Also how do you increase volumes of tracks in CEP?

 

[dobro]

Noise reduction sounds good when there's very little noise to deal with, and tends to sound like shit when the track's really noisy - it has to remove too many frequencies.

Other question: Click View>Mixers Window. That's the master volume. You can resize the popup and stick it in a corner out of the way somewhere.

For individual tracks, use the volume control to the left of the track - the one with the 'V' in the window.

 

[get2sammyb]

Noise reduction sounds good when there's very little noise to deal with, and tends to sound like shit when the track's really noisy

Does that not defeat the whole point of it?

 

[lpdeluxe]

Noise Reduction is not a magic wand, but with patience and care you can get amazing results. A friend brought by some cassettes he made with a stick-on telephone mic of interviews of his parents in Kentucky. They (the tapes) were pretty awful. Loud hum, static, unintelligible speech...at one point he said his mother was talking, but her voice could not be distinguished. I recorded about 10 minutes of it into CEP to help him figure out how to clean it up (he has CEP at home, but has very little experience with it). Simply sampling the noise and then telling CEP to clean up the track resulted in "Alvin & the Chipmunks"; too much of the noise was in the vocal register. So we did a high pass sweep and a low pass sweep (telephones are pretty narrow-band devices), then lowered the % of noise reduction until the voices started popping out at us! This took several hours of experimentation over 2 evenings, but at last I sent him home with a sequence he could follow to make listenable CDs from these cassettes. It pays to be meticulous: once you have "Noise Reduced" some of the information out of existence, there's no way back (well, there are Undo commands, I guess). On the other hand, I have been recording vocals, of course through a really sensitive condensor, and had my neighbor fire up his leaf blower! In that case I was able to clean it up very nicely with one pass.

 

[dobro]

"Does that not defeat the whole point of it?"

No. It works wonders with small problems. If you've got a little bit of hum on a track, it'll remove it without impinging on the overall sound of the track. But like I said, if there's loads of noise you want to get rid of, Noise Reduction will get rid of it, sure, but it'll get rid of lots of the sound that you *want* to keep, and that defeats the whole point of it, yeah.

It's like a cosmetic that makes the person's face look better, unless of course it's been ravaged by acne, in which case it doesn't make the person's face look better.

 

[Rusty K]

Hey,

Thought I'd jump in with a comment and a question.

It's really important to "isolate" a section of the track with just noise. It's very easy to highlight a section that has other extraneous sound in it. If you don't have quiet sections in the track to work with it's tough but I crank my speakers on the quiet parts to listen closely for any other extraneous sound. I do this till I find only "noise".

I'm currently trying to record just noise of my puter, guitar amp etc. to obtain noises profiles but I'm a bit skeptical because there are always so many recording variables on any given day. I'll have to use a profile and hear it work.

Sample size question...I don't remember what the default sample size setting was in noise reduction but I clicked my up to 6000, if I remember, and my noise reduction has sounded much better. Could someone enlighten me a bit on how to arrive at the best sample size setting?


Rusty K