How to Clean Up Audio Recordings

How to Clean Up Audio Recordings

Whether you’re recording podcasts, music mixes or voiceovers, clean audio is essential. Messy, distracting audio can instantly put your audience off.

To get clean audio, you need to ensure that you’re recording in a quiet space away from any noise. Avoid air conditioning units, traffic sounds and other sources of ambient noise.

1. Audacity

Audacity is a free, open source audio editor that can help clean up audio recordings. It has a variety of tools for adjusting the audio’s sound quality and removing background noises.

When listening to a recording the last thing you want to hear is background noise. It can be distracting to the listener and make the recording seem less professional.

The first step to adjusting the audio’s sound quality is to import uncompressed audio files into the program. This will ensure that your editing doesn’t have a negative impact on the file’s sound quality.

Another important step is to select the areas of the recording you want to edit. The selection tool is available in the top left corner of Audacity and allows you to select specific portions of your audio track.

Once you have selected the parts of your audio that need cleaning up, you can begin working on them. You can use the multi-tool to manipulate the audio by selecting different parts of the sound file and dragging them around.

2. Auphonic

Auphonic is a web service that helps you clean up your audio recordings by automatically leveling out, reducing noise, and more. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge.

The first two hours of processing are free, but there are plans available that allow you to process a lot more. They have a one-time credit plan and a subscription plan called “Recurring Credits.”

It’s important to note that the audio files you send to Auphonic are exported separately, so it won’t affect the final quality of your podcast. If you have multiple tracks, you can even upload them all at once!

Auphonic also has a number of other features that will improve your podcast’s audio. For instance, it can add chapter marks and transcribe your podcast. It can also export the final podcast file directly to a variety of different podcast hosts and popular websites like YouTube.

3. Dolby On

If you want to clean up your audio recordings, Dolby has a free app for iOS and Android called Dolby On. This app will do all sorts of things to make your music sound the best it can – including reducing background noise, optimising volume and widening the stereo effect.

Dolby On uses a combination of dynamic pre-emphasis (Dolby B) and dynamic de-emphasis (Dolby Decode) during recording to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, or how much of the music is heard compared to the background noise on the tape.

It also uses a process called “Dolby noise reduction” on playback, which is essentially a form of compression and encoding that tries to lower the amount of coding noise in a digital signal. This works by dividing information into small chunks, and then reducing the coding noise when it gets close to the frequency of the audio signal.

4. Cubase

Cubase is an award-winning digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Steinberg for music and MIDI recording, arranging and editing. It’s used by musicians around the world, including Calvin Harris and David Guetta.

It’s also the software of choice for many professional recording studios. Its feature set is regularly updated to keep it up-to-date and modern.

One of the most useful features in Cubase is the ability to create regions within a clip. You can use these to mark important sections within a clip, such as drum hits or notes.

Another useful feature is the Control Room. This adds a monitoring layer between the main mix output and the physical soundcard outputs, providing the same level of control that you’d find on a hardware mixing desk. In addition, there’s an extensive Media Bay for managing all your audio and MIDI material. This can be very useful for anyone who needs to keep track of their music in an organised way, but it’s not essential if you don’t need to tag your files with the right metadata.