There is noise in your recording if you hear a (slight) hiss or hum in your recording.
With most exceptional peaks, this information is not relevent, but if parts of speech get clipped, they will sound very ’80 computer-like. The Hard Limiter clips all peaks louder than a certain dB value. You can either use the preview function, or hit OK and undo and retry it every time too much or too little gets clipped.Ĭaution is advised when using this feature. Play around with this value so only the exceptional peaks that you want to remove get clipped, but none of the normal peaks are. Leave the Wet level at 1.0 and the residue level at 0.0 but change the dB limit to a little bit more than the number you just found (so if the highest of the normal peaks is -13.0 dB, use, for example -5.0). You can drag the bottom line of the waveform to enlarge it.įind the dB level of one of the highest normal peaks. You will see a scale from -60 to 0 to the left of the waveform. You can do this by clicking the triangle next to the name of the file and selecting “Waveform (dB)”. Those peaks most likely correspond to unwanted sounds like someone coughing, touching the microphone, a door slamming, etc.įirst of all, find the loudness in dB of the peaks that you don’t want to remove. If a lot of your recording has the same loudness (meaning most of your peaks reach about the same height, let’s call those peaks the normal peaks), with a few exceptions (let’s call those peaks the exception peaks), you should use the Hard limiter. The height of the peaks indicate the loudness of the sound registered at the point in time that peak corresponds to. If this did not fix your problems, there are probably a few peaks that are way larger than the others. The loudness of the file has been changed, but all other parts of the sound remain unchanged. The sound should now have a more continues loudness. You will probably be fine leaving the settings as they are, but if you know what you’re doing, you can play around with them. To use compression, select the entire track that you wish to compress, or a part of that. The compression filter in Audacity will increase small peaks and decrease low peaks in your file, to make the loudness more continues, while retaining some loudness variation. If it is still not loud enough, undo normalization, try the “Hard limiter” option and then normalize again. The audio should now be leveled to -1.0 dB If your recording was a stereo recording, select “ Normalize stereo channels independently” for optimal effect, but stay clear of this option if you are not sure. Also check that the white textbox has the value -1.0 dB
Make sure “ Remove any DC offset (center on 0.0 vertically)” and “ Normalize maximum amplitude to:” are selected. If your audio recording is not loud enough, select the entire track in audacity and then click Effect –> Normalize In an optimal recording, lower peaks come close to 0 dB as well, but don’t reach it. For a (digital) recording, the highest peaks should reach 0 dB but not exceed it. The recording sounds metallic or unnaturalĪudio levels are measured in dB’s.There is too much noise in the audio recording.Within one audio clip, sound levels fluctuate too much.Loudness in seperate recordings varies too much.The solutions make use of the audio editting program Audacity Troubleshooting This is a troubleshooting guide for problems you might encounter with audio recordings.
#Audacity compressor how to#
If you have suggestions on how to improve this document, or find mistakes, please send them to Last updated on 3 July 2014 by Jan de Mooij
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