Hello everyone, and welcome to my channel Jennifer
Marie VO, where I teach you different ways to make money
online. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to my
channel for more videos related to working from home. So many of
my videos focus on making money by transcribing audio to text
for different companies. And many times you'll get a file
where the audio is really difficult to understand. Maybe
this is because the audio file is really quiet and you can't
hear it even on maximum volume, or there's a lot of static and
background noise in the background. Or maybe the speaker
is just talking too quickly for you to understand what they're
saying. So if you encounter any of these issues, there is a way
to improve the audio quality, remove background noise, amplify
the audio and even slow it down so you can transcribe it
accurately. You might even want to do this step before you run
the audio through an audio to text software tool like otter.ai
and make sure to check out my tutorial on that in the
description below so the software will transcribe your
file for you more accurately. We're going to do all of this
with a free audio editor called Audacity. You can download this
using a Windows or Mac computer or laptop. So let's go ahead and
go to audacityteam.org then click on download. And from the
drop down list, you can choose Windows or Mac. So let's click
Windows. Now at the time of this video creation, the most recent
version of audacity is 2.3.3. So just click on the audacity 2.3.3
installer and this will direct you to fosshub.com where the
download files are hosted. So then scroll down and click on
the Audacity Windows Installer or Mac depending on your
operating system. Then click save file and proceed to follow
the instructions on your computer to install Audacity.
Now I already have it installed. So I'll go ahead and open it up
on my computer. Okay, so this is what Audacity looks like when
you open it up. It might seem a little intimidating at first,
but it's actually really simple to use. And for this
demonstration, I'm going to demonstrate how to clean up
audio using a file recorded by my Grandfather many, many years
ago on a cassette player that I recently converted to mp3. Now
to do this, you'll need to download the file from whatever
platform you're using, but it can be in any audio file format.
What we're going to do is go to File, then click Import, and
then click audio. So now you're going to locate on your computer
the file that you want to clean up or improve the audio quality.
Click the file and then click Open. Okay, so I've just
imported this file, and as you can see, there's not very big
soundwaves it's actually really quiet but what I want to do is
I'm going to click on this Zoom tool, and then click on the file
to zoom in a little bit, and I'm just going to preview the
quality of this audio so you can see the before and after of what
we're going to do. So I'm just going to click if this here is
the selection tool, so if you just click anywhere on the
audio, you can start playing it. And then you can press the play
button, or you can also press the spacebar on your computer to
press play. So I'm going to play like 10 seconds of this so you
can hear
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff but dry.
Okay, so you can hear it's really quiet and really
difficult. This was recorded decades ago, over 10 years ago.
So we need to first of all, I want to make this louder. So
what we're going to do is press Ctrl A, on your keyboard and as
you can see now it's highlighted. So I'm gonna click
off and again Ctrl A, it's all highlighted. Then we're going to
go to Effect, and then click amplify. And here, I want to
make the amplification to -3.0 dB. So this amplified it 12. So
just put it to minus three, then click OK. And as you can see now
it's going to be much louder. So let's go back, press play again
Another time while living in the same house...
Okay, so it's much louder, which is good, but we still have this
background noise that we don't want, this right here. So what
we need to do to remove the background noise is to select a
sample of the background noise. And then we're going to
basically tell Audacity, hey, I want you to remove everything
that sounds like this. So let's go to the very beginning. That's
a good little sample, try to make it as long as possible. But
maybe in your clip, it might just be a small little sample of
static. Or if you have one that's longer try to go as long
as you can. So let's try this here. So as you can see, I've
used the selection tool to select this portion of audio.
And then I'm going to click effect. I'm going to go to noise
reduction, select that, then click get noise profile. Okay,
so now that's basically told Audacity. This is the profile of
the noise that we want to remove. So now, we want to click
Ctrl A again to select the entire clip. Go back to effect,
back to noise reduction. And then just click OK. And it's as
you do see how it did that it went through the entire file and
it's removed this background noise. So let's press play now
and see if we can see a difference between before and
after.
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover, some...
Okay, so you can see it's removed a lot of that noise,
there's still a bit of a hum in the background, who we can even
try to do it again if we want. So I'm going to try you another
time, get noise profile and do the same thing again. See if we
can clean up the audio even more. And as you can see, it's
still removing even more for us. So you can see the difference
between before and after.
Another time while living in...
And if you want to keep trying throughout the clip different
noise profiles to remove that staticky background sound you
can keep doing that. Now let's try to amplify it again, even
make it a little bit louder if you want. Now let's press play
again and see what that sounds like.
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff but dry.
So you can try to even make this louder if you want. There might
be a maximum of how loud you can make this. I believe the loudest
you can make this is at the new peak amplitude of zero. So this
is as loud as we can make this. And as you you see, that's
because they don't want these sound waves peaking.
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover...
Okay, so let's say I was like I don't really understand what
he's saying. And I want to make this go a little bit slower.
What you can do if that's your issue is you can again click
Ctrl A, then go back to effect and we're going to click change
tempo. And what this will do is, we'll change the tempo without
changing the pitch. Okay, so what you can do is scroll this
down. And now let's click on Preview to see what it'll sound
like.
Another time while living in the same house...
So what you can see is that has made it slower, so we can
understand even more so you can even go down further if you want
to make it even slower.
Another time while living in the same house...
Okay, and then all you have to do is click OK. So now, I'm
going to zoom out this file before if I go edit, undo you
can see the length right now it's a minute 35 seconds. If I
go undo, the original file was a minute and 15 so it has
stretched it out a bit. I'll go redo...
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover...
Okay, so that has made it much slower so we can even understand
it better. And now I'm going to click on undo because I don't
need it to be any slower. I just wanted to clean up the
background noise. And what you can do if you want to save this
as an mp3 file because maybe now you want to put it in otter.ai
and transcribe it. So it's clearer for for otter.ai or
another transcription software to transcribe it to text. You
can click File, Export, and then choose Export as mp3 or export
as WAV file.
And then we can go I'll just put this result.
Save.
Okay.
Okay, so now I want to play the before and after result of just
doing that quick little audio cleanup. So let's play, press
play on the first one.
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff but dry.
Another time while living in the same house, the fields were
covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff but dry.
Okay, so that is me cleaning up the background noise and
increasing the volume of the clip. And also of course you can
change the speed as I showed you but this is just with the same
speed of the first one just with cleaning up the background
noise. Okay, so I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I
hope that this helps you in transcribing and understanding
what the people are saying in these files that you are
transcribing. If you liked this video, please click like and
make sure to subscribe to my channel for more videos on how
to make money online and more transcription tips. Thank you
very much for watching!