Best way to get rid of a background sound in recordings?

[Sherbet42]

Long story short: I've found a [cv] voicebank I made around 2012/2013-ish before the VA's voice broke (so I can't just remake it without it being something completely different, sadly) and sort of want to clean it up, but you can hear the tick of a fan in the background of the recordings. I recorded this before I hardly knew what a VCV was, the bank's a total unfinished mess.

Any tools/apps/software that you can think of that might help me with this? Or is it not worth the effort? Audacity works in theory, but the amount of noise reduction needed to clean it out kills whatever quality there was like a jpg meme that's been shared too many times. Not much of a comparison 'blank audio' file other than small gaps in the cv's recording files themselves. At worse, I was thinking of having super short files, but utau itself might not like that.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Kona]

I would use Audacity or any other audio software and just mess around with EQ to get as much out as you can. You’ll have to experiment around, but using EQ, you can pretty much find and reduce the frequencies that have the noise and boost the frequencies of the vocal if needed.
That ‘s the only way I can think of to do it at least.

 

[mobius017]

You might try iZotope's RX7 software. It's a bit pricey, but you could get a free trial to start. Nothing's perfect magic, but it can do pretty well removing tape-hiss-like sounds. This video has a step by step tutorial on how to use it; if the version of the software you get has a module called De-Click, that might help, too, based on your description of the sounds you want to remove. (Though I have the best luck with the procedure from the video, so I'd recommend starting with that.)

The software does need a bit of "silence" to calibrate itself; if you don't have a long enough bit in your existing samples, you could always copy multiple bits of silence from them and combine them into one bit of sound for RX7 to calibrate on. Or even take one bit and copy-paste it to itself until it's long enough, though the results might not be as good doing that.

 

[haru0l]

You might try iZotope's RX7 software. It's a bit pricey, but you could get a free trial to start. Nothing's perfect magic, but it can do pretty well removing tape-hiss-like sounds. This video has a step by step tutorial on how to use it; if the version of the software you get has a module called De-Click, that might help, too, based on your description of the sounds you want to remove. (Though I have the best luck with the procedure from the video, so I'd recommend starting with that.)

The software does need a bit of "silence" to calibrate itself; if you don't have a long enough bit in your existing samples, you could always copy multiple bits of silence from them and combine them into one bit of sound for RX7 to calibrate on. Or even take one bit and copy-paste it to itself until it's long enough, though the results might not be as good doing that.

By the way, the $49 deal is still running, should the trial end before you finish cleaning up the samples (It also includes a whole bunch of stuff, so check it out)

iZotope Deals

View current deals on iZotope products and access savings on audio plug-ins for mixing, mastering, audio restoration, and more.

www.izotope.com

 

[mobius017]

By the way, the $49 deal is still running, should the trial end before you finish cleaning up the samples (It also includes a whole bunch of stuff, so check it out)

iZotope Deals

View current deals on iZotope products and access savings on audio plug-ins for mixing, mastering, audio restoration, and more.

www.izotope.com

Another note: that trial includes the Elements version of RX7. If you happen to need a higher version at whatever point, iZotope basically always offers upgrade deals once you have a version of their software. Just something to keep in mind in case you need it. You could well get the results you need from Elements, though.

I sound like I'm plugging RX7, but it really does a good job. I used it to clean up the birdsong samples you can hear in this song; they came off an old children's tape recorder, but they still came out really well after some careful cutting and then cleaning with RX7.

 

[inactive]

If it's an intermittent click you're trying to remove, noise removal/reduction techniques won't be effective. Your best option is software that can do spectral editing. Audacity is free and can do spectral editing, but I'm not sure how good it is. Reaper also has a free unrestricted trial, and it also supports spectral editing:


There's plenty of other options if you google for "spectral editing", some free, some paid.