How To Remove Echo From Audio In Audition
Unwanted echo and reverb on audio recordings occur when sound reflects off walls, floors and ceilings with enough strength to be picked up by the microphone. Completely removing these effects from a recording is impossible, but freeware audio editor Audacity has some tools that may help you reduce the effects of these sound reflections, the most effective usually being a noise gate, which allows you to control echo, reverb and other noise between segments of important audio.
Download and install the noise gate plug-in provided through the Audacity website, if you do not see 'Noise Gate' listed under 'Effect' on the toolbar. You may need to restart Audacity after installing the plug-in before it appears on the menu.
Open the audio file with the echo you wish to reduce in Audacity. Click 'Effect' on the toolbar and select 'Noise Gate' from the list. The noise gate window is an offline effect, meaning that it will process your audio before you play it back to hear the effect.
Set the controls of noise gate to remove echo and other unwanted noise content. Start with 'Level reduction' at -100, 'Gate threshold' at 30 and 'Attack/Decay' at 75. Level reduction tells the gate how much to reduce unwanted audio. The gate threshold sets the volume level at which the gate starts to reduce sounds and the attack and decay setting affects how quickly the gate process starts and stops. Click 'OK' to start the process.
Play the result of the noise gate process. Evaluate the effect of those settings. If there is no change to the echo, increase the threshold setting until the echo occurring after important audio is sufficiently reduced. Reduce the threshold setting if the noise gate cuts off important audio. This process may take several attempts. Click 'Edit' from the toolbar, then 'Undo' to restore your audio to its original state between attempts.
May 2, 2018 - The audio presets I use. Learn how to master audio production. Removing echo and reverb using effects inside Adobe Audition CC.
Complete beginner to Audition, I usually just shoot video and then edit in Premiere. I recorded some audio in a large room with flat walls. How to Remove/Reduce Reverb or Echo in Premiere Pro As a filmmaker, I spend a lot of time working on audio – cleaning it up, making it sound better, and trying to match the quality of video with high quality audio.
Adjust the level reduction and attack/decay settings to make the noise gate effect more natural, after you find an effective threshold level. Increasing level reduction adds some echo, but you can control what level. Increasing the attack and decay time smooths out how the gate effect begins and ends. Slower settings make the effect less noticeable.
Tips
You may be able to use an equalizer to 'tune' a resonant echo out of a recording, but this is not a technique that applies to all cases.
Warnings
Work on copies of your original file to prevent loss of data if you accidentally over-process your audio.
Video of the Day
More Articles
How To Remove Echo From Audio In Audition Free
Remove Echo From Video
Complete beginner to Audition, I usually just shoot video and then edit in Premiere.
I recorded some audio in a large room with flat walls, which produced a ton of echo in the recording; you can really hear the subject's voice bouncing off the walls.
To try and fix this, I looked up a few tutorials and combined some techniques. Here's what I did:
Captured the noise print of the ambient room tone
Used noise reduction to get rid of that room tone
Used parametric equalizer to remove some annoying frequencies. Basically swiped around with a peak until I found a frequency that sounded strange, then reduced it to -15db. After lowering a few frequencies, the quality of the voice sounded much better, but it had almost no effect on the echo.
Used another parametric equalizer to enrich the voice, I guess? Very slightly increased the highs & lows and decreased the middle frequencies. This made the voice sound much more crisp and less muffled.
Added a single-band compressor. I guess this evened out the volume of the voice? It didn't make a huge difference, but still improved it a little.
There was a tutorial that recommended you lower the middle frequencies through the dynamics processing tool. I tried this, but it seemed to just lower the volume of the voice and had little to no effect on echo.
Overall, the voice now sounds much better, it's much more pleasant to listen to. However there's still a ton of echo; after the subject says something, you can hear their voice bounce around the room.
Is there anything else I could do to reduce this (without external plug-ins)? Any feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks!