Denoise proposal

I use different daws for many reasons and even though I’ve tried a lot of De-noisers and related processes, I think I might be able to propose a different approach, one that could prove be valid in certain (obviously not all) situations and still be very DSP friendly (and to be honest kind of easy to implement).

Should an Ardour developer be interested in taking a look at what I want to share, I’d be happy to explain, I’d prefer to be directly contacted rather than publishing the whole idea, as if it turns out to be valuable for Ardour, I’d be happy to see that first in ardour than anywhere else.

Have you tried Noise Repellent: GitHub - lucianodato/noise-repellent: An lv2 plugin for broadband noise reduction? It is excellent! I had the impression that at some point in the future it might find its way into Ardour as an “ace”-plugin (formerly a-plugin) but I could be wrong. In any case, it is already an existing lv2 plugin that does the job very nicely. That said, I’m intrigued by your mystery proposal :wink:

The goal is to tightly integrate it, so one can learn noise-patters offline by simply selecting a region/range on a track. Ideally with an LV2 extension so that the noise-repellent can remain a separately maintained project.

indeed. Almost sounds too good to be true!

While this is a different aproach, it is quite dumb and simple (I just have no time or programming skills to implement it, so I do it by manually)

Supposing we have a voice actor track that we want to clean up, instead of trying to reduce volume of the unwanted parts, let’s literally nullify them:

  1. Double target track (sending to a bus will do as well)
  2. Invert phase of clone-track

Now we have a 0 - null - output

  1. COMPRESS clone-track - so it ducks hard everything but the parts where the voice actor is not speaking.

Not much to be said at this point but the obvious: You are now zero summing all parts that are not hardly compressed, and by tweeking the compressor settings you will be able to better adapt the settings to your specific track so it doesn’t sound weird.

This will consume some parts of the audio that you DO want but fall below the threshold, so keeping that in mind, again, play a bit with the compressor and as a workaround you can always low the fader on the clone-track a bit to reduce the effect and have those sibilances back for example.

I am pretty confident this should works as well with other tracks such as Drums, I’ll be happy to see results in that area.

No need to say how easy it would be to implement inside a LV2 plugin for both Ardour and Mixbus (I use V6 32C).

On the downside, and this should be obvious too: high ground floor noises and basically any noise that disturbs within the audio that passes the threshold will not be nullified as it will be ducked as well, but hey! Easy and cheap super denoiser - can’t be flawless.

I hope you guys like it, try it and let me help out in some way when trying to implement to LV2 or VST.

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That is a very good idea (!), and you’re not the first one to come up with it.

What you describe is a common technique to remove reverb tails: De-Verb for Free: Removing Reverb using Free Plugins | Random thoughts from a lowly musician

It doesn’t usually help with noise though. Especially if that noise in top of the voice that is audible, and not just in quiet periods in-between.

To simply silence quiet parts you could use an expander/gate plugin. An expander is an inverse compressor and pretty much does what you describe internally.

That’s what I thought (can’t be the first to think about it) so I looked for other people doing the same but couln’t find either a plugin that did it or anyone discussing it, however I did notice it to be great removing the tails of a room reverb as well.

I’ve been struggling with different types of noise with long tracks I cannot replace, one being thumbs at the end of phrases and while I did not get rid of them all, I did get rid of the most disturbing noises by setting the compressor to recover quickly (allowing fast incoming noise to fall down the threshold) and attack late (so quick but noisy thumbs would still be nulled before the compressor attacked) and it helped me a lot (no noise gate, de noiser or de clicker was able to do that), that is why I thought it’d be nice to share.

Also, bringing multiband compressors make it even more interesting, same as a multiband expander would. I’ve tried the spectral compressor from Harrison, but there are no attack or release options so while amazing, a bit limited.

Thanks for answering!

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