The Sound Board

A pretty impressive demo - especially since they don't pretend to make the noise disappear. I think I need to give this a try.

Yes, I noticed that too Anders, except those claps at the end, and you can hear a bit of work going on. But it's pretty damn good, and I'd take those artefacts over the noise. What might be more of an issue is a lack of sensitivity control, it varies wildly for me how aggressive you need to be with it / how much you can get away with.

Perhaps my expectations were on the high side, but I will be sticking with my current tools for the time being.

If one is just starting out with noise reduction tools this might be a good starting point - if the demands on the tool are modest.

Has anyone tried this on Dialogue?

Thanks for taking the time to do that, Anders. Have to say that's an extremely challenging example - I actually wouldn't use any broad NR tool on that, since the problem areas aren't constant. I'd load it into RX Spectral Repair, find the HF I needed in the speech and then attenuate the area around it, which is the mic / clothing rustle. Oh, plus some basic EQ, HPF etc.

Very kind of you Anders to do these experiments. Very telling indeed. Very helpful.

...and I'm still in my procrastination phase of the morning, so for "fun" I spend 10 minutes on it in RX6 Spectral Repair - https://app.box.com/s/x7daow058rv57y9ygy4eota4jc01gli7 . It's not perfect - more time spent = better result, but still it's clearly the best of any of them imo. But you see the problem. It's a painstaking, miserable task and there's still no real autofix for this kind of thing, broadband clothing rustle is still a big problem. De-rustle in RX6 Advanced is close - it's miraculous on more scratchy sounds, but less good on this irregular more white-noisy type problem, the worst case scenario. I just did a very simple pass with de-rustle here - https://app.box.com/s/4iuhkp780eyxciz8i6r4g70sfhjml4ln - just for demonstration of the issues for using it in this way, and half way through (once the clothing noise has gone) I take it out - you can hear it clearly. Most alarmingly, some of the S or F sounds have gone completely using this. So at the moment for this specific problem, slow and manual is the only fix that really works that I know of.

I know I know! I feel your pain. When it's something out of the ordinary I ask for extra time (I had to take out a screaming (literally screaming) disabled person present in an audience recorded show. A one hour show.... sigh. That was sooo tedious, I charged an extra day and they gratefully paid. But in the normal run of things you have to let a lot of stuff like this example go, there just isn't time to fix it all. iZotope has really done wonders there though - clicks, pops and rustles are so much quicker and better fixes than even a couple of years ago, it's why I say that audio-wise RX is the one tool I'd have if I was only allowed one.

Hopefully RX7 will tackle these swishes with de-swish...

I've not tried automating the EQ, will give that some thought but I can imagine it's at least as fiddly and time-consuming as using spectral repair to get into the forensic detail you'd need.

Ah yes, I was thinking clothing but you're quite right, that's RF noise - an absolute bugger to get rid of. And just as you say, in the mix passed over at speed, you get away with it, as is so often the case. Nicely done!

Tangent - a colleague of mine takes on a trainee every year from a prestigious music college. He says that without fail, no matter how good they are - and they are really good - the thing everyone struggles with is working at speed, and knowing when to let stuff go. You have to go from a purist academic environment to the brutal reality of the real world pretty fast...