Okay, so I had this bunch of voice overs I recorded for a little project I was working on. Sounded easy enough, right? Just talk into the mic. But man, when I played them back, it was rough. Really rough.
First Listen – Ouch
I sat down and just listened to the raw files first. That’s always the first step, gotta know what you’re dealing with. And yeah, it wasn’t pretty.
- There was this annoying hum in the background on almost all of them. Probably my computer fan or something.
- My voice level was all over the place. Sometimes loud, sometimes quiet. Hard to follow.
- Lots of little mouth clicks and pops. Gross.
- And of course, a few stumbles, long pauses where I lost my train of thought.
So, yeah. Needed fixing. Couldn’t use them like this.
Getting Started – The Clean Up
Alright, time to roll up the sleeves. I fired up my usual audio editing software. Nothing fancy, just the one I know how to use.
First target: that background hum. Found a quiet spot with just the hum, told the software “this is the noise”. Then selected the whole track and hit the noise reduction button. Had to play with the settings a bit, didn’t want to make my voice sound tinny or weird. Did a few passes, listening carefully each time. Got it mostly out without messing up my voice too much. That felt like a win already.
Next, those clicks and pops. Went through the timeline, zooming way in. Found those little spikes in the waveform and just cut them out. Tedious work, clicking and deleting, clicking and deleting. Took a while, but made it sound cleaner.
Leveling Things Out
Now for the volume jumps. This part’s always tricky. I could use a compressor tool, but sometimes it squashes the sound too much for my liking. So, I mostly did it by hand.
I listened through, watching the volume meter. When it got too quiet, I boosted that section. Too loud? Pulled it back down. Tried to get everything sounding reasonably consistent. Not perfectly flat, you still want some natural ups and downs, but just… listenable. Less jarring. Used a ‘normalize’ function at the very end just to bring the overall peak level up to a standard point.
Cutting the Fat
Last big step was dealing with the mistakes and awkward silences. Listened through again, this time focusing on the flow.
Found those spots where I paused for way too long, just chopped out the silence. Found the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and cut them. Had one sentence where I totally messed up the wording. Tried to salvage it by cutting and pasting words, but it sounded Frankenstein-ed. Ended up just re-recording that one sentence. Plugged the mic back in, said the line a few times until it sounded right, and then edited the new recording right into the old track. Much better.
Final Check
Okay, so after all that cutting, boosting, reducing, and replacing, I did one final listen-through. From start to finish for each file. Just making sure everything flowed okay, no weird glitches from the editing, volume felt right. Made a couple more tiny volume adjustments.
Then, finally, I exported the cleaned-up files. Felt pretty good, honestly. Took a bit of time, more than I expected, but way better than the originals. Usable now. Job done.