LibriVox Forum

Hello,
I've done a few recordings on LV and although they're good enough to be PL OK, there's still some background noise. I'd like to do the noise cleaning but here comes the problem with my microphone – it's voice-activated so the gaps between my words are filled with silence instead of the noise (which appears again when I start speaking).
I can do the noise cleaning but it's more complicated because I have to look for some tiny section of the noise itself (which is difficult as the microphone turns off almost immediately). So, my question is: Is there any way to make the mic record all the time when I want to record and not just when I'm speaking? I don't use any special microphone, just the inbuilt one in my laptop (Dell Vostro).
Thanks for anyone's help

There should be a setting somewhere to turn off the voice activation. Check in your Windows control panel for recording devices.

On a Win7 computer, you can right click on the speaker icon in your system tray, then select Recording Devices. Select the microphone, then click on Configure.

Other operating systems? I don't know.

P.S. It also sounds like you might have noise cancellation turned on, since simple voice activation shouldn't remove noise from between your vocals. Look for noise cancellation as well, and turn it off.

TriciaG wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 10:27 am P.S. It also sounds like you might have noise cancellation turned on, since simple voice activation shouldn't remove noise from between your vocals. Look for noise cancellation as well, and turn it off.

Thank you. I suggested to Kudrna that help would be available. The community never fails in coming to help!

You may also look into noise gates. These let you set a thread hold where all noise under that threshold is removed. There quite a few free ones for audacity. I don’t use audacity so I can’t offer a personal recommendation but upon a quick google search this one looked good https://sourceforge.net/p/audacity/mailman/message/26116585/

cowguy02 wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 3:25 pm You may also look into noise gates. ...

They work great. The only trouble is the resulting recording is completely unnatural. I'd rather have room noise than complete silence between sentences. Of course, every listener has their preferences...

re dead silence. to quote a listener - it's spooky. Like listening to a dead person

Anne

tovarisch wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 3:52 pm

cowguy02 wrote: ↑July 2nd, 2019, 3:25 pm You may also look into noise gates. ...

They work great. The only trouble is the resulting recording is completely unnatural. I'd rather have room noise than complete silence between sentences. Of course, every listener has their preferences...

Correct, the point is that with a noise gate you could noise reduce the files under the words. and with a quick noise room track mixed in you could fix your problem completely.

Thank you all for your advice.
I tried to change the settings as Tricia suggested (I use Win10 but it's similar) and then I found the "microphone amplification" option. It was set quite high so I tried to lower it and eventually turn it off completely. I'd say it helped a lot and with a bit of audacity cleaning it'll sound much better than before.
However, if the noise starts again, I'll give a try to the noise gate option, it sounds great, too.
Thanks again for your help

So glad you got it working!

Yes I adore my noise gate. So much better then noise reductions because you don't do audio samples it takes the noise down as a whole.