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I have a couple of recording were the audio is quiet I was wondering if anyone can help me please.

The best thing to do is just post the raw audio files. Or if you want to clean them up post the raw ones and the fixed ones..

Now for your Q. Are you talking about hiss or static? Static is near impossible to get rid of. Hiss can be dealt with to some extent, but being more than a little zelus with the noise removal tool (I should say in audacity, but this holds for petty much any audio editing software) will leave artifacts (sounds that are created by the imperfect nature of the way the noise reduction works) that in many peoples ears are more annoying than the original noise.

This is a Q&D of what I would probably do in audascity.

Load the file.
scroll down in the effects and find the highpass pass filter. click ok Set that to about 250Hz and a -48db/oct rolloff. Run it. That will kill off any rumble or low frequency noise.

scroll down in the effects and find the lowpass filter. Set that to about 8000Hz and a -48 db/oct rolloff. click ok This will limit the HF response to 8Khz, which should be fine for speech. This will get rid of a lot of high frequency noise.

The more noise we can get rid of before this point the better...

listen to the file. Crank the volume up. Find a part that has only background noise. No breathing or moaning. No cars going by. Just the steady state noise of the room or recorder or whatever. Longer is better than shorter here. A few seconds will do, 10 seconds or more is better. However you want pure background noise. Once you find it, highlight it. Cick play and play it. Verify it is just the noise.

scroll down in effects to noise reduction. Click on get noise profile. This will load in the little piece you have selected. Close the effect.

double click on the audio file. Verify it is all highlighted.

scroll down in effects to noise reduction. I have found the following settings to work well for me and not leave the original sounding too shabby. Overdoing this will give your finished product a really evil phase shifting kind of effect that drives me nuts.

Noise reduction db 4
Sensitivity 5.00
Frequency smoothing bands 8
leave the rest alone.
click ok

Now if the file is quiet, look on the net for an effect called the "Fast Lookahead Limiter" for audacity. Install it. The web is your friend.

Go to effects and pick the fast look ahead limiter. If your file looks like an almost straight line at zero crank the input gain all the way up to 20. This slider is like the volume control. If the file has minimal peaks in it, this will boost them. If it has some peaks in it, turn the input gain down a bit.

I always keep the compression at 0 and the release time at 0.01 (seconds)

The fast look ahead limiter will amplify up to a point, than stop. It is like cranking the volume up but it will stop it before it will overload. This does not mean it will sound good. If your track is dynamic to begin with (has lots of peaks in the graph) you might be better just cranking the volume. Best I can say is screw with it. Get a feel for it.

The above procedure should get you close. Save the file when you are done.

This is a great description, thank you Reg!

I will pin this message on top of this subforum for everybody to find a quick how-to.

thanks for the information i tryed it and it worked a charm thanks.

Indeed... thank you very much for the editing guide... I was already looking for something like that for quite a long time...

BTW, another useful tip. I tried this one one file posted the other day and it worked well enough to pass on. Again your mileage may vary..

If you set up the noise reduction as I described above in Audacity, so it does not leave audible artifacts in it's wake, you can go back under effects and run the noise reduction again. On the file in question I thought there was some whispering going on so I wanted to crank the volume up but the hiss was just too loud, to the point of causing discomfort. I wound up running the file through the noise reduction again 5 times. I used the short cut to repeat noise reduction in the effects menu. In the end I could not hear the whispering I was after but I was able to hear some of the subtle gasps and low moans that had been hidden in the noise before. Give running the file through a mild noise reduction a bunch of times a shot and see how it works for you.

Thank you for this valuable help. I think getting a descent mic will help me a lot to start with. I've been recording with the internal mic of the iPhone which is not catching all of what I can hear.

Or you can try it with a simple small USB recorder, at amazon for about 10-15 € or so...

Hi Thomas, do you have a suggestion which one?

If you are at all good with electronics, probably the best high sensitivity, low noise capsule is the BT-EM172. You can get them for about $12 a pop on line. You will need to solder up a cable for it, and there are a few caveats with them. One of them being they want near 9V excitation on them for the best performance.