Fixing Stupid Voice Audio Tracks in Audacity with 4 or so Settings! (AKA Making Your Voice Audio CLEAN!!)

Update: So its more than 4 settings!... 

So basically my raw audio tracks suck a bit, well i thought they were great and then people started saying man I cant hear you, or too much bass, or you are talking through a blanket.

Well thanks a lot... But yes it was true. I actually spend more time fixing audio tracks than recording stuff most of the time, very annoying! 

Who cares you say? No thats me... Ok onto the audio settings. 

This is in Audacity by the way for my Voice so i guess settings will be different for you, and mic type, and all that stuff... anyway. These are the settings i use.

Noise Reduction

Clean your audio! Dude.... Ok i need to relax. And get on with it. 

Select a part of your clip that is almost quite, no peaks and do this:

then get noise profile

Then select the whole track and run it again.

This should reduce the background noise.

Breath and Click Removal

This one really sh%!s me... for some reason as i open my mouth or close it or something i get this stupid click every now and again, Argh! Sometimes worse than other. But still its annoying. idk if other people even notice it but I do so im going to remove it. 

Breath i like to remove as well, this is more of a manual and per track. This is how i do it...

For clicks, the only way i found that is consistant is to bind silence to S on your keyboard and then go through and look for it. 

Before this i add a breath noise gate.

This section is a breath, and its loudness is just above -42db so you can then use a gate on it, anything lower than 42 we want to flatten.

Select the whole track for this

these are the setting i use to make it not sound weird, but it still can make some breaths sound weird, and S sounds and other quiet sounds so you still have to check it, you cant just run it and hope for the best.

These gate setting seem to work quite well for me:

Noise Gate Settings

• Select Function: Gate

• Stereo Linking: Link Stereo Tracks

• Gate threshold (dB): -42.00

• Gate frequencies above (kHz): 0.00

• Level reduction (dB): -30.0

• Attack (ms): 20.0

• Hold (ms): 50.0

• Decay (ms): 120.0

Click Removal

I basically know what my mouth click looks like so i scan the track and silence them all. you can try and gate the click but you might end up chopping out a bunch of good stuff from your audio as well.. its annoying.

I have yet to find a good solution for this one. 

EQ / Treble Boost

Fix the tone while the audio has "room" to move.

Effect > Eq and Filters > Filter Curve EQ. Select Treble Boost.

Apply this to make it a bit more easy to hear the voice. Make sure to test the audio and see if it sounds ok after each step. 

High-Pass Filter

Remove any low-end mud introduced or remaining. Effect > Eq and Filters > High-Pass Filter. Set the Frequency to around 80Hz or 100Hz. Set the Roll-off to 12 dB per octave.

Again try this and test the audio, check if it sounds better or worse. 

Loudness Normalization (-20 LUFS)

This is one i just add at the end as my mic is kinda low. But it seems to work ok.

Do this last to ensure your final output is exactly at the volume you want after all tonal changes.

perceived loudness should be -20.0 LUFS

Some say it should be higher or lower but i found that -20 seems to work well for me...

Ah i forgot one... Make sure to do the gate before all of this other stuff. Added it above.

Now check the track. 

Anyway thats the settings so far. I keep finding more that takes me even longer to get a nice track, but i guess its worth it in the end after a few times doing this you can do it fairly quick. except for the dam click removal. 

🔉👍