I have used sound soap for years. It’s the Cadillac of noise removers imo and it is very powerful.
Not sure if it works with Ardour as I’ve just discovered this site. Looking forward to firing it up and seeing how much trouble I can get into! 
How does Sound Soap compare to RX4 which is very very good ?
The last time I tried Soundsoap, which was admittedly a while back, Izotope handily beat it. THe advantage to Soundsoap was that it was simpler to operate, but with minimal time invested learning Rx, you got much better results.
That being said, for the ‘cadillac’ of noise removal, most people would point to CEDAR, or another piece of software I can’t think of right now and is now going to bug me until I can.
SeabladeAlgorithmix, that was who I was thinking of. Their Renovator software. I think most people would put that and CEDAR as the top these days, but I could be wrong, I haven’t used them myself so can’t speak to it either way, but saw some impressive demos of it a few years back.
SeabladeI’ve seen Cedar Demos and tried noise reduction on their demo computer. It is good but extremely overpriced. You can get 90% of the same results by doing it with iZotope RX4.
If you are working for a national security agency and need to clean recordings done secretly, then cost does not matter and you can buy Cedar. I think that is much of Cedars business anyway. But for average workshop RX4 is at a good price / performance point. Haven’t tried Algoritmix.
Yes, but we were describing Cadillacs there, not best ROI
Hmm, last post got cut off.
What was supposed to be there, was a comment that neither of those are great Investments unless you are making a living off of those tools specifically
I think I need to walk back my ‘Cadillac’ analogy. I haven’t kept up at all with what’s out there. I just know soundsoap got the job done at an affordable price and was relatively easy to use.
@mhartzel soundsoap has a try before you buy option. My guess is that it compares to the rx6 elements by iZotope.
And rx6 has a full working 10 day trial as well. We await your report
Maybe somebody who has worked on both SoundSoap and iZotope RX can give us a comparison. I used to work as a sound engineer for 16 years, but early this year I changed careers and I’m an IT person now. In my old life I would have tested SoundSoap right away, but now the only audio stuff I do is writing music with Ardour, recording only “clean” sources. I no longer have a personal need for noise reduction.
See above:)
As I mentioned, SoundSoap was an ‘easier’ to use solution, Izotope was capable of much better reduction. I used to own Soundsoap, switched to Izotope, haven’t looked back really.
As I said Soundsoap may have improved, but it would have had to have been significant to match what can be done with a bit of work in Izotope’s destructive editor for instance. Pretty sure the realtime processing was even better in Izotope, but honestly the destructive editor/editing is what allows you to get some pretty good results.
SeabladeJust an update on noise removal/filtering. I transferred some interview cassettes to digital and that had a lot of unwanted noise. One audio engineer commented that the recordings were beyond hope. But then, another audio engineer not only filtered out the noise and restored the audio, he used Reaper ReaPlugs to do it! (Which are free.) He took snapshots of how he did it. Reaplugs works on Wine just fine. That said, I am still waiting for Noise Repellant to be in reposReaPlugs is a pretty durn good tool set to have.
@Fanthomstory what distro are you using? I can provide easy install instruction for you. Noise repellent is really easy to compile and install you shouldn’t wait for it to be packaged in any distro. This is a useful link for the previous discussion on sound soap vs izotope http://audio.rightmark.org/lukin/restoration/spectrum.htm. Believe me I’ve read all the papers and technically rx is a way ahead of every other tool. The link above is from the guy who created rx denoising algos. Noise repellent is inspired in his work.
@lucianodato Currently I am running Ubuntu Studio. that seems t be the only thing that works okay with my graphics card (which still has issues, but less than other distros). I have tried to install Noise Repellant last night, but had difficulties. If you can give me a step-by-step, that would be great.
As for RX et al, sure if you can fork-over buckets of cash, I am sure there are all kinds of great solutions. I get more impressed with people who do amazing things with more modest solutions. Mind you, this looks like exactly what I am looking for: http://harrisonconsoles.com/site/xtools.html But it seems I need buy their hardware to get it. Maybe later this year they will have something for ‘the rest of us’. I look forward to using Noise Repellant, though.
Detailed procedure for ubuntu and derivates:
1- Open a terminal
2- Write the following comand:
sudo apt update && sudo apt-get install lv2-dev libfftw3-dev python3-pip ninja-build git
3- Then write this one:
sudo -H pip3 install --upgrade pip
4- Then this other:
sudo pip3 install meson
If those command have run correctly you have what is needed for correct building of the plugin. So next up is getting the plugin.
5- Now clone the repo from git with the following command:
git clone https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-repellent.git && cd noise-repellent
6- Now we have to give permission to the installer script in order to run with the following command
chmod +x install.sh
7- Then you can run that install script using the following:
./install.sh
Note that in all those steps you may be asked to introduce your user password in order to proceed. With all that done the plugin should be recognized by your DAW next time you open it. Instruction to use it are in https://github.com/lucianodato/noise-repellent
Please if you have any trouble at all don’t hesitate to contact me here or in IRC (I’m “arguy” in #ardour channel)
it compiles well enough.
i do it sometime and had not get errors.
i use standart package system and try to not install things without packages.
below - today’s build of noise repellent for debian. hope, for ubuntu it will be usefull too.
for those pupil, who not need to waste much time for true packaging, “checkinstall” is as well as needed.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=18F8VpfwZ7ZcfdIe8Y-kfcJw0Of30Awbv
Thanks eugeen!
@lucianodato Thanks, I did get it installed. I have the plugin and am trying it out on some projects and will get back to you on it. Thanks for doing this as it is one of the missing pieces for DAW plugins in Linux!
On Arch - based distros you can compile the source package from Arch repo (tested on Manjaro):
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/noise-repellent.git
cd noise-repellent
makepkg -sf
sudo pacman -U --noconfirm *.pkg.tar.xz