A friend of mine brought over an audio file and asked if I can help him reduce some of the background noise so he can hear more clearly what’s recorded in the audio. I don’t know any good audio editing tool at first but a quick Google Search led me to this tool that worked out quite impressively effective.
Audacity is a free, open-source audio editing and recording tool for not only Windows, but macOS, and Linux as well. It’s a full-blown audio editor that offers so much features and one of these features is to reduce noise of the audio file. It takes a sample of the background noise from the same sound audio file and uses it to reduce it throughout the track.
And here is how to do it.
First, let’s import the audio file to the tool. Audacity supports many types of sound files out of the box but if you get any error messages saying something about missing FFmpeg library you might need to convert the file to a more generic format, such as MP3 or WAV format.
Once you have the audio file imported, you can highlight a few seconds of background noise sound you want to reduce from the file.
Then go to Effect > Noise Reduction from the toolbar and click Get Noise Profile button to build the noise sample.
Once done that, highlight the section of the audio track you want to apply the noise reduction and go to Effect > Noise Reduction from the toolbar again. Adjust the settings how you want the noise reduced, and click OK when ready.
You will see the result in a few moments. And the result is quite impressively.
Next time, if you run into a situation where you need a decent audio editor to improve the sound quality of an audio file, give Audacity a try.