How to Remove White Noise from Audio in Audacity

Have you ever recorded a vocal track in Audacity only to notice that your recording has a ton of white noise in it? For those who are not aware, white noise is a type of noise that can drown out the main voices. It’s a common problem. Most consumer-grade microphones that are available have terrible sound pickup. This kind of thing can be quite annoying!

How do you fix it? Well, you could go out and buy a better quality microphone (which you should probably do), or you could do a quick trick to make Audacity remove all of the unwanted white noise that regularly shows up on your tracks during recording.

Tip: Make Audacity more efficient by using these keyboard shortcuts.

How to remove white noise from audio in Audacity

Removing white noise from audio tracks is a really simple process. It only really requires a few steps to accomplish. For starers, you’re gonna need to get the white noise sound alone. It needs to be isolated. Why? You’ll have a better chance of getting rid of it if you get a clear recording of it.

Accomplishing this shouldn’t be hard work. Just record some audio with Audacity and don’t say anything into your mic. Let it go for a couple of seconds (thirty at most) for best results.

Once you have your white noise recorded, select it using your mouse. Then go into the “Effect” drop-down menu and look for the “Noise Removal” option. Click this and you will be brought straight into Audacity’s noise removal feature.

Inside the noise removal window click the “Get Noise Profile” button. This will make Audacity take note of your white noise and save it temporarily.

After that just go back to Audacity and record your vocals like normal. When you’re finished with your recording, go back into the “Effect” drop-down and into “Noise Removal.”

From there, just click the “OK” button to start the removal process. Audacity will do a fairly good job of extracting the white noise from your recorded track. It’s not 100% perfect, but it does work well if you have a white noise issue you’re looking to get rid of.

Note: Don’t worry about tweaking the settings in Noise Removal as the defaults work best.

Make your audio sound even better

Here’s a quick trick to make your audio sound a little bit better. Select your entire track with “Ctrl + A,” click the “Effect” drop-down menu and click on “Normalize.” When you do that, you’ll see a little pop-up selection menu appear. Just click the OK button to start the process.

Why do this? If you record quiet audio, it’s probably a good idea to normalize your tracks. When you do it, it allows you to make the overall track louder without changing it’s dynamic range. It’s a neat little trick, and it’ll help you out a lot if you’re a frequent Audacity user.

Conclusion

White noise can be a real pain when recording, so it’s really great that it can be easily removed with the help of a simple feature within Audacity. You shouldn’t rely on this feature, though, because it’s not perfect. That being said, it has gotten me out of a lot of tight spots. I hope it’ll help you as well!

Do you know of any Audacity tricks? Let us know in the comments below!