One of my celebratory toys to start the new year is a quality microphone. That single purchase started a chain reaction.
After making a few recordings and basking in the glory of improved audio quality, I found a need to upgrade other components in the audio chain. That got me toying with software to reduce hiss and noise in some older recordings.
Garageband’s noise reduction tools are useful and competent, but there are two other apps that do an even better job.
Spend Lots Of Money (or, not so much)
My home recording studio isn’t much on the studio aspect of audio recording. Concrete walls. Wood desks.
And the place is loaded with Macs, screens, hard disk drives, printers, and a good old air conditioner.
That means the place is a noise magnet made even more powerful by a high quality microphone. What’s the best way to reduce noise in audio recordings made where noise rules?
For that you need a tool that reduces the hiss and noise within the audio. Garageband has a filter but it’s not ready for primetime.
On the high end is iZotope’s RX2 audio repair toolkit. It removes noise, hiss, buzz, hum, clicks, crackles, and restores audio to a near pristine condition. For Mac users, it works in Garageband and Logic.
The user interface is mostly self explanatory. Select a section of noisy audio. Click the Learn button. Save it as a preset, then let RX2 removes the offending noise.
RX2 is a professional level product with a pro price tag. For Mac users on a budget I recommend Brian Davies’ DeNoise. It’s nearly one tenth the price of RX2′s lite version, and drop dead easy to use, even if lacking in the eye candy category.
There’s no installer. Just download and drop DeNoise into your Mac’s Applications folder.
Drag and drop an audio file onto the DeNoise window. Adjust the settings and click Start on the main controls.
DeNoise is blindingly fast on most audio files (slower on longer files). The controls are a bit confusing but there are few clicks to worry about.
You can import and denoise mono and stereo AIFF or WAVE files up to 32 bits at 192kHz. I had good success reducing the noisy clicks on old CDs, and DeNoise minimized the rumble and clicks on old vinyl records I’d digitized years ago.
Create the Noise Profile by setting the sliders to reduce hiss an noise within certain frequencies on your audio recording. The manual is extensive and worth reading before using DeNoise.
Considering the price tag, DeNoise is a bargain when compared to iZotope’s RX2, though it is decidedly more cumbersome to use. Java apps don’t win many awards for look and feel.
About Ron McElfresh
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