Freesound Forums

This is of potential interest for anyone wondering about using the recently added OpenVino AI noise suppression plug-in in Audacity, and for anyone wanting to improve noise reduction in natural soundscape (or indeed other) recordings, without paying big money.

I've now uploaded a revised and dramatically improved version of my Nature-Symphony 70 (Flies as musicians 5: pentatonic and major, with pedal tone), which I'm also calling Rannoch Moor Moods, 3 — https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/759413/ .

This was made possible by my breakthroughs in getting considerably better noise-reduction without noticeable artifacts. In my notes for the new version I explain about that, and give details of how I achieved such a big noise-reduction with minimal loss or degradation of the 'wanted' sounds. This breakthrough is amazing considering that that OpenVino module is modelled for extracting voices, so one would hardly expect it to work well for natural soundscapes.

It certainly proved tricky, though, to get it just right — you'll note that I also used Audacity's spectral subtraction noise reduction, so I'm being very pragmatic about this and no longer looking for a single 'silver bullet' to do the job.

Thank you @kriperflag for your appreciation!

I do have to (re-)emphasize all the time, though, that I found that OV always increases dynamic range in its noise-suppression module, so its uses are quite limited for my sort of work, and especially for 'straight' natural soundscapes. I spent many hours on some of those Nature-Symphony layers to try to get maximum noise reduction. That increased dynamic range made the flies and bees sound more abrupt and aggressive, and that would be the general effect on other types of subject. I actually overdid processing on the odd Nature-Symphony and had to replace it with a version with less OV processing. Altogether it was quite a taxing and fraught business to get the best I could manage, with the air here turning purple pretty often. At least, being 82, I don't have much hair left to tear out!

Thank goodness that I'm almost at the end of the flies / bees Nature-Symphonies, and the latest, No.75 (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/768528/ , using bamboo and metal chimes and rutting stags) didn't need OV.