Taking background nosic out audio of video.

I sometimes come across videos that I want to keep so I download them but when I play them I find they have background music or other crap in the video that makes it very hard to hear what is actually being said. I

I am also half deaf to boot and hearing aids do not filter out noise and leave the human speech. They simply amplify all the frequencies including the noisic and other crap.

Is there any free software for taking this dross out of the video?

thanks in advance

its probably going to get a bit messy with splitting out the audio and then processing it and putting it back.

Audacity is probably the best free thing for messing with audio and has loads of plugins...got zero musical skill etc so i've never used it but its very popular and certainly a good start.

I've heard that audacity has a noise reduction feature and is free. ( good for hiss and hum etc). Getting music out is going to be very difficult. Try fiddling with a graphic or parametric equalizer, the more bands the better. I use adobe audition which is $20 per month. ($50 for combined bundle of all adobe products) Audition 3.0 may be free. There is a 30 day trial for audition cc, which the noise reduction features work very well. Good luck

Eta. Adobe audition and adobe premiere work in concert with one another, so you can easily split the audio from a video, fix it up, click save, and the new audio replaces the old in the video.

a reply to: Azureblue

An equalizer/notch filter is probably your best bet.

The frequencies around 1KHz are where most human speech intelligibility occurs, so if youv'e got sizzling cymbals and throbbing bass messing with your intelligibility, just turn down the frequencies that they occupy and emphasize the bit where speech happens. A 6 DB boost is possibly sufficient.

This is the reverse of the filter used to remove vocals from popular music, a filter used for karioke.

Old telephone systems used this system to overcome issues with noise (which you will never really get rid of) by emphasizing the vocal frequency ranges. This is why such systems make the sound a bit 'telephone like'.

It is great for spoken word but less so for music or full frequency 'environmental' and mood sounds and special effects.

As equalisation can be applied real-time, it is the most effective system, especially as you age (like me, too). You can put the equaliser/filter between your source system and your amplifier and it will apply automatically to everything you listen to. It can make modern movies, with far too loud mood music, listenable again.

I used to ouse a program called COOL EDIT when removing background white noise from my recordings.

a reply to: Azureblue

Boost the midrange frequency... the human voice is in the midrange. Won't remove the background tho...

Also make sure you're not listening in mono: all audio jammed together. Stereo..make sure you're in left and right.

There is not going to be a way to really get the plugins for any DAW (digital audio workstation) much less any good worth while DAW for free or even cheap. I have pro tools and have used a plugin which would aid in stripping the music from lyrics before but I forget the name off the top of my head.

originally posted by: chr0naut
a reply to: Azureblue

An equalizer/notch filter is probably your best bet.

The frequencies around 1KHz are where most human speech intelligibility occurs, so if youv'e got sizzling cymbals and throbbing bass messing with your intelligibility, just turn down the frequencies that they occupy and emphasize the bit where speech happens. A 6 DB boost is possibly sufficient.

This is the reverse of the filter used to remove vocals from popular music, a filter used for karioke.

Old telephone systems used this system to overcome issues with noise (which you will never really get rid of) by emphasizing the vocal frequency ranges. This is why such systems make the sound a bit 'telephone like'.

It is great for spoken word but less so for music or full frequency 'environmental' and mood sounds and special effects.

As equalisation can be applied real-time, it is the most effective system, especially as you age (like me, too). You can put the equaliser/filter between your source system and your amplifier and it will apply automatically to everything you listen to. It can make modern movies, with far too loud mood music, listenable again.

That was refreshing to read. *applause*

Editing the audio in videos isn't an easy job, and often when you put it back, it's out of sync if you aren't careful. Chronaut has the right idea, even though it requires a bit of fiddling with each new source, but once you get certain frequencies set, the adjustments for new sources will be minimal.

Yes, you "rip" the audio from the video and use Audacity to remove noise by zooming in on a section that only contains the noise, then select that section to sample the noise sound when you use the noise removal feature. You can make the filter as soft or hard as you need to remove the noise. Then you reinsert the audio into the video as an extra track to make sure it's in sync. If you use the whole track from beginning to end, it should remain in sync. Then you mute the original track so all you hear is the noise reduced track. It has worked quite well for me. If you use too much though it will make the track sound digitally synthetic somewhat.

ETA: Audacity is a really powerful program that has graphic EQ, notch filtering as well as low and high pass filters. You can even fix phasing problems between stereo tracks down to the wave form if you had too. It takes a lot of fiddling and know how, but it can fix a lot of audio problems. You can even add efx like compression, limiting, reverb, phase, echo, etc.

a reply to: Azureblue

Been away a few days but thanks for the suggestions people, much appreciated.

a reply to: EnigmaAgent

thanks for that, I will get that.

thanks

a reply to: chr0naut

Thanks for that. It seem there are number of programs that when used collectivley might do the trick. I think the hard part will be learning how to use them.

a reply to: Azureblue

i know this thread is a touch old but as a fellow hearing aid wearer I feel your pain. If you have digital haring aids then you can go back to where you gt them and ask them to add in an extra "speech" setting which is basically where they isolate normal speech range and amplify it while filtering out background noise. If you have any specific sounds that you don't want to hear you can also filter them out by giving them a sound clip to work off.

Hope this helps.