Description
Here’s the Audacity post.
Transcription
When I record YouTube videos, these days, I always use the same Blue Yeti microphone, let me show you what it looks like. So this is the microphone I’ve been using the years, I think it looks great, it works pretty well, the only problem is, when I start a recording, and I finish my video, I actually record the whole thing, in Audacity, I can tell that there’s a persistent buzzing in beeping in the track, and even when I’m saying nothing, there’s a persistent buzzing and beeping sound. I never quite figured out how to solve this, I also didn’t really know how to search for this, because it sounds so strange – like how do you describe it? Before I tell you more about this, listen to what it sounds like I’ll use some editing magic so you know what it’s like when it’s unfiltered.
You see what I’m talking about? Even when I’m speaking, you hear it, but it’s best understood when I say nothing.
So I’ve been dealing with this sound by simply editing it out using Audacity, and that’s the trick I’d like to show you today because I thought it was pretty useful. But first let’s talk briefly about what this is called, because this was weird, when I found it. People call it frying mosquitoes. That’s right… frying mosquitoes… how could I have not have guessed that? But of course from hearing it, you have a sense now that it kind of sounds like we’re frying mosquitoes, there’s this weird mosquito effect to it.
In any case, this right here is a post from a moderator that’s essentially answering that there’s no solution. “Frying mosquitoes is caused by the digital data stream getting into, infecting the analog sound.” So there’s a bunch of notes here, but the gist is that you have to keep changing computers until you find one that actually works. That’s not great – so it sounds like the way that I’m dealing with it now, which is filtering it out via Audacity, is a pretty good way to do it. I’ll leave a link in the description in case you guys want to read this post fully, it has to do with I think the power source affecting the USB data stream, so we’ll just leave it at that for now, and I’ll show you how to deal with it.
Okay, alright, so let’s open up Audacity. Okay, so what we have to do in Audacity, and it’s going to be a bit difficult for me to show you, because I’m using Audacity to record myself in another window, so I’ll have to kind of illustrate part of this without being able to demonstrate it fully. So basically you’d have to click a portion of the waveform and actually press play, to hear. And you’re going to hear the buzzing and the beeping, but once you know it’s there, you need to also select a good portion of it.
And then you need to playback that selection, make sure that within it, you have just the beeping, just the buzzing. You need that pattern uninterrupted, because we’re going to be teaching Audacity to identify that pattern and reduce it across the waveform. So for example, if I were to do this instead, it will consider this part of the pattern, but that’s not related to the pattern. The problem that we have is the buzzing and the beeping that is persistent in the background, so we really need to teach Audacity well. So I would select something like this, I would double-check by pressing spacebar, pressing play, that this audio contains just the buzzing and beeping, and typically I try to give it, you know, like half a second of audio, a good uninterrupted portion, so it sees the repetition in the pattern.
And once I’ve done that, all I have to do is go to Effect, Noise Removal and Repair, Noise Reduction. And now what we do is we click Get Noise Profile. Okay? Now we have the noise profile, that’s helpful, but the next step is that we need to select all, which I’m going to do CTRL+A to achieve that, and then I’m going to go back up to Effect, going to click Noise Removal and Repair again, Noise Reduction again, but I’m not going to click Get Noise Profile, I’m going to actually go to the bottom here and just click OK.
Now, this had an effect. I can’t actually show you right now, because I can’t press play. But it actually went through the recording once and tried to clean it, okay? So the exercise now would be to actually play the recording, and see, hmmm, did it remove enough? Do you still hear the buzzing and the beeping? If you need to do it again, I would recommend that you take another sample, where you hear the buzzing and the beeping. And it’s going to be not as bad as it was before, because we just removed it across the whole track.
And at that point, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to again go to Effect, click Noise Removal and Repair, Noise Reduction, we’re going to get a new sample. And then we’re going to select all again, we’re going to go back to Effect, Noise Removal and Repair, Noise Reduction, and we’re going to click OK. And that goes through yet another time. And you do it as many times as you need, but in my case I do it twice. And then typically when I’m listening to the recording, I can still tell the beeping is there when I’m speaking, and that’s because Audacity struggles a bit when it’s in the middle of speech, because the waveform, there’s other stuff happening there. So it can like cleanly remove that without hurting my speech.
And then typically after making these modifications, I will save the project, save the project as, and give it a different name, something like example clean, as opposed to example raw, just so I can tell the difference. Yeah, so that’s how I clean up my audio. I’ll play the before and after at the end of this video just so you can see the difference it makes. As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out, I’m here to help.
This is what it looks like when I speak in the middle of my recording, and then if I click the mouse, and press on the keyboard.
This is what it looks like when I speak in the middle of my recording, and then if I click the mouse, and press on the keyboard.
This is what it looks like when I speak in the middle of my recording, and then if I click the mouse, and press on the keyboard.