Introduction to voice acting online: Recording and cleaning up your voice files in Audacity

Part one of the recording and editing tutorial for our introduction to new voice actors, this time the tutorial shows you how to record and remove noise from a file recorded in the free audio software Audacity.


In the previous article in this series I talked about low end microphones. Now I’m going to talk about recording. For now we’re just go through the basics, so that you can send of auditions and lines for productions at the highest quality you can manage. As I said if you’re just starting out with a cheap microphone, you’ll likely pick up all sorts of noise. This tutorial is going to walk you through recording and cleaning up your files in two popular pieces of free software. First off Audacity.


Audacity Tutorial The first is the open source audacity software. Audacity is pretty popular since it’s free and also offers multi-track facilities. It’s noise reduction can be a little basic, but it’s worth learning all the same. You can get audacity from it’s website. Once you install it, press the record button and check to see if it’s recording. If not go to Edit> Preferences> Then click the drop down menu next to recording and make sure your microphone is selected. You can adjust the recording volume using the slider at the top of the screen.
 

Once everything has set up press record, and record a test sample leave a few seconds at the start and end where you don’t speak. Take a listen at my audio file fresh from my PC with no editing. The file is downloadable so provided you can edit MP3s you can follow along.( see the LAME details at the button of the post )

Oh dear! If you’re anything like me you can hear my pc fan in the background there‘s also a nasty click where I knock my microphone. I've highlighted the click there so you can see it
 

The click is simple enough it’s on it’s own so I can highlight it by holding down my left mouse button dragging the cursor over the section and then pressing delete. Now I have to deal with the background noise. I went to the end of the file and highlighted a bunch of noise. Then I went to effect> noise removal and select get noise profile. Once I’d done that I shut the window and deleted the bit of noise at the end. I then selected the whole file. I then went back into noise reduction and used the stage 2 box, moving the slider about and pressing preview. The further to the right it was the less noise there was, but the more distorted I sounded. I adjusted the slider until I was happy then clicked remove noise. The noise was then gone! The last thing I did was selected normalise from the effect menu. Normalise smoothes out your file so the volume remains constant. Make sure remove DC offset is selected and I want to set maximum amplitude to -3db. You can hear my final file here. I then want to file save as mp3, If you haven’t run Audacity before this requires some set up. You need to download the LAME codec from it's site.