Remove breathing sound from your audio recording // Audacity

Key Takeaways

hello everybody and welcome to a short tutorial on how to use noise skate to remove the breathing sounds in your audio recordings for this I use audacity uh 2.0.1 it's a free software very easy to use so you can try it in that yourself to do what we want to do I made a test recording which sounds like this this is a test recording I hope you like it and as you can hear there is pretty intense breathing in that recording which is not good at all especially if your audience is using headphones to listen to you this breathing is directly in their ear it's not very pleasant to listen to so we want to remove that the first thing you want to do is go up here to audio track and select waveform DB so now you can clearly see wow there is a very loud breathing in this recording let's remove that to do that um select a part of your recording to test it and um go to effect effect and down here it says Noise Gate and here this is also why we switched to um waveform DB is because now we have on the left side here is a scale from 0 to minus 60 that we used to make these settings here I use the gate frequency above zero so anything uh gets filtered by The Noise Gate uh level of reduction you can choose what you want to choose do you want to remove the complete breathing sound or just lower it a little bit mostly I just lower it because breathing is natural and if there is no breathing sound at all you will sound like a robot so that is not a good idea just remove a little bit of it now check in your recording on average how how high the breathing sound is going in the scale on the left side compared to the rest of the recording uh that which is use speech basically yes and this will of course also remove any other noise that is below that so if you have other sounds that are below that they of course will also be lost so this is just for audio speech recording and other things I don't know I can't tell so as we can see this is end almost at the level of 33 so let's use this as a setting 30 3 on the gate threshold so this is where the gate is activated everything that is higher on the minus part than 33 so this um voice part the attack Decay is how fast um this is going to be activated and um so you don't want to set this too low because then it will chump inside of you breathing in the parts that are higher or lower so does doesn't work that well just set it on a average I used 250 milliseconds for that in this example you can just you have to test around what works best for the recording you can then use it on the whole recording and see how it worked on the other breathings and and then redo it if it didn't work at that that well let's test it here and yeah looks pretty good so the breathing isn't completely removed but it's much lower than before let's listen to it again this is a test recording I hope you like it not so bad we could do it even lower so I go to edit and undo then I go back to the effect of Noise Gate and just set the level reduction to a higher value on the minus degree let's make it minus 27 and as you can see now it's completely gone so let's listen to it this is a test recording I hope you like it no breathing at all it's if you like it like that it's okay but a little bit of breathing is human so um you want to keep a little bit of breathing in there as you could see right now other stuff like the beginning of what you say will also be cut a little bit but I think it doesn't sound that bad if you go undo again you can see here in the beginning in the first seconds here uh there is where you your voice sets in and this will also be cut a little bit but mostly that's no problem as you can hear just redo the Noise Gate and well listen to it this is a test recording I hope you like it sounds pretty okay to me I think you decide yourself you do your settings yourself but this is how it works with a noise skate and it's pretty easy and it's pretty fast and you can use it on hourong recordings of your voice podcast whatever you do um just uh be be sure to know that all the other noises that are also below that part will also be lowered in that kind of value so if you work with a lot of little sounds probably not that useful to you but for audio recordings pretty good thanks for watching that's it and see you soon bye