I work at one of the indoor skydiving wind tunnels. We’re trying to set up a simple audio feed from the the driver’s booth (just outside the tunnel) to a few locations around the building. I can pass the audio over our network here but I need a way to filter out the white noise coming from the tunnel. At the moment it makes the audio feed completely useless. After reading a few forum posts and a few walk-throughs on other websites it seems that running JACK and Ardour will be the best approach but everything I can find is for much more complicated setups. If someone could help me get on the right track I would greatly appreciate it.
I’ve been doing IT work for 6 years but I somehow never had to learn how to set up an audio system like this.
If a specific plugin does what you need, you don’t need Ardour, there is a simple application called jack-rack that does little more than connecting to JACK ports and piping the sound though effects of your choosing. Sending the sound over the network isn’t easy but it can be done, read up on netjack.
Filtering out white noise is the hard nit to crack though. Maybe you need a throat mic or something.
What you are describing, removing noise in realtime in a dynamic fashion, is some of the most complex processing that is done, and honestly I doubt you will ever get satisfying results depending on the S/N ratio. Generally if the original audio is difficult to understand as it is, a cleaned up version of it won’t be great, and doing so in realtime won’t give satisfactory results.
The basics is you would need to use a plugin like Izotope RX or WaveARTs MR Noise, for example, and utilize these within Ardour. And for what you are trying to do, OS X would be your best option as no appropriate plugin exists on Linux.
Frankly I think your best option isn’t to do DSP processing, but rather to isolate and reduce the white noise in the source as best as possible.