You’ve probably had to contend with background noise if you’ve ever recorded a podcast that includes songs, or a speech. It’s difficult to avoid an irritating hum or scream in the background unless you have a professional setup.
Fortunately, most audio editing software includes options for removing background noise. And, while each of them are ideal — you can anticipate certain noises to remain or the sound to get warped — they can assist in removing irritating sounds.
Here’s how to utilize Audacity, one of the more popular audio editing apps,’s background noise removal tools.
In Audacity, how do you remove background noise? We’ll utilize Audacity’s Noise Reducing tool to remove background noise.
- Launch Audacity and open your audio file.
- Look for a location in the audio with only background noise. The longer that period lasts, the better. If you can’t discover any times with simply noise in the background, try to locate the most conspicuous area.
- Draw your mouse over that instant to highlight it.
- Select Get Noise Profile from the menu. Audacity will look at the chosen moment to determine the sound of the background noise.
- When finished, close the menu and choose your whole audio file. You may rapidly do this by typing Ctrl + A on a PC or Command + A on a Mac.
- Click OK to return to the Noise Reduction menu (Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction).
Audacity will utilize the previously developed noise profile to eliminate all of the matching noises from your file. If you don’t like the result, simply undo it (Ctrl + Z or Command + Z).
What should you do if there is still background noise?
We utilized the Noise Reduction instrument’s default settings in the preceding steps. However, when you accessed the menu, you likely noticed a few distinct sliders. If you don’t like how your music file sounds with the default settings, experiment with these sliders. The Noise reduction (dB) dial controls how aggressively Audacity attempts to muffle background noise.
If you set this slider too high, you’ll begin to muffle the audio you would like to hear as well. Instead, keep it as low as possible while still eliminating background noise. The Sensitivity slider controls how much of the sound Audacity will attempt to remove as background noise. Set this once more as low as possible without removing the noise.
The number of frequency bands that Audacity will attempt to decrease noise in can be changed using the Frequency Smoothing (bands) slider. The official Audacity documentation advises making this lower whether you’re editing music and higher whether you’re editing speech sounds. The default option is 3, but you should change it if you’re editing music.
Lastly, you have the choice between the two alternatives Reduce and Residue. Reduce, which is the default setting, enables Audacity to muffle background noise. The converse is true with residue, which eliminates anything that is not background noise. This is useful for figuring out what Audacity is attempting to eliminate as noise.
