Using Special Audio Processes To Make Audio Clear And Crisp

We’re going to go over some of the special audio processes in Express Scribe and how to use them with a file with poor audio. The first process is background noise reduction. Background noise reduction takes out some of the background sounds.

If the audio has a lot of background noise that is loud, often, background noise reduction results in a file with tinny, garbled sound. So, try it out and if it doesn’t work, you can hit undo, which restores the original audio.

If you’re working with a large file, then it might take a few minutes to run background noise reduction or other audio processes within Express Scribe. I find that I don’t use background noise reduction that often because sometimes the tinny garbled sound is more distracting to me than working with bad audio. The next process is an extra volume boost, which can help with low volumes and soft audio.

If you’re doing an audio with two speakers that was recorded in stereo mode, and one of the speakers is hard to hear, you can adjust the individual channels. In the View menu, click Show channels control. This will show the channels if it’s in stereo, but if it was recorded in mono, this won’t show, and you won’t be able to adjust the audio of just one speaker.

High pass filter is designed to reduce some of the lower bass sounds and keep the higher frequency sounds. I don’t use it that often. You can try it in combination with the background noise reduction or on its own. Another thing you can do is to adjust the auto-adjust or range compression. This setting amplifies the softer parts of the audio without making the louder portions any louder.

You can get to this setting in the Preferences Playback menu. For hard-to-hear audio, I change the setting to weak or none, which reduces the background noise a bit. You can also use it with other special audio processes.

Let’s experiment with some of these settings. I’m using the file Saving Money On Groceries.

You can download this audio file here: Download Audio File

This file has a bit of background noise that can be hard to work with. So, I’ll see if we can clean it up. Now that my file is pulled up, let’s go ahead and experiment with some of these.

First one I’ll do is the background noise reduction. So, I will do that. And we are going to listen to what this sounds like, and then what the original audio sounds like.

Please select “Background noise reduction” on your audio file. Listen to the sound of the audio and then compare this to the original audio file by clicking “undo”.

So, you can hear that it’s still a little tinny and garbled.

And the last one that I’ll try right now is the high pass filter.

And again, we’ll listen to the original recording and compare the audio quality.

You will notice that this one actually isn’t too bad and you should be able to transcribe with it this way.