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Quick question:

A woman I work with did an interview with a customer using her laptop to capture audio.

She used a cheap mic, and to make things worse on the recording you can hear the hard drive spinning up. It is pretty loud. Actually probably 75% of the volume of the voice.

Any recommendations on lowering the level of the hard drive whir?

Thanks!

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Comments

anonymous Tue, 03/25/2003 - 03:21

Yes, Doug is right, Cedar de-noise and Waves denoiser are great tools.
There are also some other alternatives: cool edit pro and a few wave editors have a de-noiser. Tough they maybe not top of the line, they are usable, and some are not too expensive. So if you have budget considerations, it might be a good avenue.
Of course, the first thing to do is to record (get a sample) of noisy material, without the voice, so the program can analyse it. Usually, you can easily get this sample either at the beginning or the end of the recording. You can also get this sample in between spoken words or, even better, pauses. To do a good job, you need, in my opinion, at least 1 or 2 seconds. Then the program will analyse this noise and, hopefully, do a good job in removing it.

anonymous Tue, 03/25/2003 - 03:29

It is generally a good idea to try different settings in the denoiser. First, you need to make a back-up of your original track. Then try different percentages of noise removal. If you utilize extreme settings (because you will want, like everybody else, to remove it all!), you might get unpleasant artifacts. But if you can remove, lets say, 75% of the noise or more, it will sound dramatically better. Depending on the situation, a bit of residual noise could be acceptable, and you will not get these nasty artifacts.