I inherited an Articulate Presenter-based piece in which the audio was recorded at different times, using different microphones, etc. The voiceover talent was no longer available so I re-recorded using new voices. I always record using Audacity, but I find it’s built-in effects are limited and weaker than the ones in Soundbooth. After much trial and error, I landed on the following settings for cleaning up and improving the sound of the audio wav files, in Soundbooth CS4:
1. Apply Vocal Enhancer: Default effect.
2. Normalize process
3. Apply Reduce Noise process:
– Reduction: 25%
– Reduce by: 15%
4. Apply Compressor: For Voice: Subtle
5. Apply EQ Graphic: Bass Management:
– Low: 0
– Low-Mid: -3
– High-Mid: 0
– High: 8
6. Apply *another* EQ Graphic effect, just like above, only this time with the High setting back at 0.
What I found was that I had to always click ‘apply’ for effects before moving on to the next one. In other words, don’t get cute and just load up the ‘effect stack’ and then apply them all – in my case it didn’t sound good if I did it that way.
Unfortunately, Soundbooth does not offer a ‘batch processing’ feature for these effects, so for the 27 or so wav files I had I had to do each individually, which took some time.
Lastly, once I did the above for each of the wav files, I then used Soundbooth’s “Volume Match” batch feature to match the volume of all of the tracks of the first wav file in the group.
The result is not a perfectly clean set of audio and it’s definitely not ‘pro’ level but it’s a heck of a lot better than the source wav files were.
Keep in mind also that the EQ and Compression settings will probably need to be tweaked depending on the type of voice(s) audio you have. In this case, the majority of the voiceover audio was a female with a medium to upper-medium, sorta ‘nasally’ vocal sound. These settings took the ‘nasaly’ out and definitely helped.
Do you have a preferred set of audio processing steps? Also – I’d prefer to just do everything in Audacity. Any plugins that you have found that do a good job cleaning up voiceover audio? What I’ve found is that ‘stock’ effects intended to do this just don’t help much or make it worse. Like Soundbooth’s ‘Vocal Enhancer’ – it’s not very good by itself, in my opinion. I’m amazed that there isn’t a simple tool built to do this. But I guess with everyone’s voices sounding different it’s impossible to get right.