The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hi folks,

Does anyone know a free program or plugin that uses spectral subtraction to remove noise?

Music Studio Producer (frieve.com, recommended!) is an excellent free DAW which for me has only two bad points: hardly an English manual, and no good noise filter. There is a noise gate but that doesn't remove noise from the parts where there is actual music (rather than just background noise). I don't seem to get good results with Audacity either.

Thanks!

Spectral subwho?
Goldwave has a good hiss and pop filter if that's what you're looking for, plus its free. But I'm sure the guru's have something better.

ReaFIR is exactly what you are looking for, and the only free VST FFT noise reducer that I know of. That said, even professional-quality spectral noise reducers are notoriously bad sounding; I would avoid them if possible and stick with noise gates. Noise gates have never steered me wrong.

I agree with Adam!. I've used spectral noise reduction plugins and they always make everything sound like a badly-compressed mp3 (which is unsurprising since they work under pretty much the same principle).

Cheers all for the replies! BLT, I've considered getting Goldwave but was wondering if there is a free alternative. Adam!, ReaFIR looks spot-on, I'll try it. Don't know if my computer can handle real-time noise reduction, if that is what it does.

About noise gates: I see that the ReaGate plugin (unlike the native MSP one) lets you specify what frequencies to apply the gate to - that might solve my problem of quiet notes being gated out along with the noise (or the noise not being gated out in order to keep those notes).

The goldwave one is good, copy a chunk of the noise you want to remove, use the audio clipboard setting and set it between 60-75% - any more and you usually get flanging, any less and you can't hear any real difference, IME.

It may not be free, but it's cheap as chips. And you can run a demo for quite a while before it gets assy.

PlainSongs wrote:BLT, I've considered getting Goldwave but was wondering if there is a free alternative.

I got mine free. I tried the trial version, then decided I liked it. Then I got a shareware D/L somewhere. I can't remember off hand, but I do know I didn't pay for it. I pretty much just use GW for final production, like, maximizing volume without compressing peaks, cleaning up start/end, pops/clicks and reformatting files to MP3s.

j$ wrote:The goldwave one is good, copy a chunk of the noise you want to remove, use the audio clipboard setting and set it between 60-75% - any more and you usually get flanging, any less and you can't hear any real difference, IME.

It may not be free, but it's cheap as chips. And you can run a demo for quite a while before it gets assy.

I have a copy of this and while it's not technically free, older versions have easy cracks... I've heard... I've heard they have easy to find cracks.

I use the gold wave noise filter audio clipboard feature and it works gggrrRREEAAAtttt. Jcash is right though, too much and you have that 'badly encoded mp3' sound.

But as always: garbage in, garbage out. You will still have to go for the best signal to noise ratio. Also, record the noise at the beginning of the file before using noise gate hardware (or realtime software) on your actual recording. You still need noise for the 'copy' or 'clipboard'.

I'm going to be completely honest. I import a file into GarageBand, then drag it over to iMovie, and use iMovie's noise reduction tool under audio editing. Then, after applying it, I drag it back over to GarageBand and export. It actually doesn't sound bad at all (when used in moderation).

rogerroll wrote:I'm going to be completely honest. I import a file into GarageBand, then drag it over to iMovie, and use iMovie's noise reduction tool under audio editing. Then, after applying it, I drag it back over to GarageBand and export. It actually doesn't sound bad at all (when used in moderation).

Now here's a man after my own heart. This is how I work with everything, all the time. Not specifically iMovie or GarageBand, since I don't have a mac, but you know, don't expect one program to do everything. Usually, there is no one program that does everything well or easily that I am trying to accomplish. People look at my drawings all the time and ask "what program did you do that with", thinking that if they had the same program, they would get similar results. HA! Data is data. Bash on it with what you've got.

With that said, I have a question. Is it possible that a program increases volume of a sound track without changing the dynamics? In other words, simply raise the levels of the quiet and peaks evenly.
My movie program is called Ulead Video Studio 7. It has a few sound track editing tools and one is volume with the default always at 100%. I can take it to 0 or raise it to 400. I may be wrong, but I swear that when I raise it above 100%, it doesn't have a ceiling for the peaks, so if I double the volume, it just simply doubles the volume and doesn't just bring up the quieter parts.
Is this possible?

Billy's Little Trip wrote:With that said, I have a question. Is it possible that a program increases volume of a sound track without changing the dynamics? In other words, simply raise the levels of the quiet and peaks evenly.

That sounds like a volume knob to me. I may not be understanding you correctly but it seems to me that you could use any old volume booster to increase the volume by %200 and so on.

When I use compression during mastering, I try to find a decent ratio that will keep the dynamics...well, dynamic BUT increase the volume overall. Technically, its NOT increasing the volume of the quiet and peak parts evenly only doing a good job of keeping the dynamics relatively safe while increasing the volume overall.