Graham Efurhievwe
Aug 30th, 2022
It doesn’t matter how much-specialized gear and production experience you have, background noise comes for us all. Some noise will always find its way into your recording.
It could be distant car noises or background rumbles from a low-quality microphone. You can shoot in a completely soundproof room and still get some odd room tone.
Outside wind can ruin an otherwise perfect recording. It’s a thing that happens, try not to beat yourself up over it. But that doesn’t mean that your audio is ruined.
There are ways to remove background noise from your audio or video. It mostly depends on what platform you’re using. For this guide, we’ll be discussing how to remove background noise in Adobe Audition.
Adobe Audition is an industry staple digital audio workstation (DAW) popular for its dexterity with recording, mixing, and editing audio recordings. Adobe Audition is part of the Adobe Creative Suite which includes classics like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Audition is well adjusted for any kind of audio production.
It has a beginner-friendly UI that appeals to a lot of people, while also having multiple templates and presets to speed up your process.
Audition offers a handful of ways to remove background noise. It features light, non-damaging tools like equalizer, as well as more hardcore background noise removal tools.
Video producers that use Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro CC are particularly fond of Adobe Audition.
As a rule of thumb, it is advised that you try the gentler tools first so you don’t risk damaging your audio.
Before diving into some of Audition’s built-in tools for noise removal, feel free to check our noise reduction plugin, AudioDenoise AI. Using AI, AudioDenoise AI is able to identify and remove background noise automatically.
After installing AudioDenoise AI, you may need to use Adobe’s Plugin Manager.
Sometimes, the background noise in your audio is a constant hiss and presents as such. This is what is usually described as a noise floor.
Adobe Audition offers multiple equalizers to choose from, and you should play around with them a little to find which ones you prefer to reduce noise with.
Audition lets you choose between one octave, one-half octave, and one-third octave equalizer settings.
An equalizer is really good at removing low-end background noise from your audio recording.
EQ is good for low-intensity noise, but not very useful for more serious stuff. EQ won’t magically get rid of all noise but it is a step in the right direction.
Frequency analysis is a cool tool that helps you find and remove background noise in Adobe Audition.
Unlike with Equalizer where you manually find the problematic frequency band, the Frequency Analysis tool helps you localize the troublesome frequencies.
After you have pinpointed where the noise is coming from, you can apply a filter.
The Spectral Frequency Display is another cool way you can localize and remove any additional noise you may have picked up while you shoot.
The Spectral Frequency Display is a representation of the amplitude statistics of specific frequencies as they change over time. This feature helps you highlight any sound that is obviously contradictory to your work, e.g a broken glass outside of the scene.
Spectral Frequency Display highlights the “abnormal” sounds in your audio and you can do whatever you want with them.
This is a specialized noise reduction effect by Adobe.
Noise Reduction / Restoration also contains the Hiss Reduction and Adaptive Noise Reduction tools which are also discussed here.
This tool has loose noise and true sound differentiation, so use with caution and experiment with the sliders for best results.
This tool differs from the Adaptive Noise Reduction effect by being more manual and aggressive.
Sometimes what we hear as background noise in Adobe Audition may be noise from distortion caused by your audio source going into overdrive.
Check out our article where we go into detail on audio distortion and How to Fix Distorted Audio.
Another way to get rid of unwanted noise in Adobe Audition is by using the Adaptive Noise Reduction tool.
The Adaptive Noise Reduction Effect is particularly useful for wind noise and ambient noise. It can pick up small sounds like a random gust of wind. Adaptive noise reduction is also good at isolating excessive bass.
Echoes can be really problematic and are a major source of noise for creators. Hard, reflective surfaces like tile, marble, and metal will reflect sound waves and cause them to interfere with your audio recording.
Unfortunately, Adobe Audition isn’t well equipped to handle this and doesn’t offer any feature that really works for echoes and reverb. However, there are several plugins that can handle this with ease. Top of the list is EchoRemoverAI.
Noise gate is a really effective way to remove background noise, especially if you’re unwilling to risk any audio quality.
It’s also really useful if you’re recording large swaths of speech, like a podcast or audiobook, and you don’t want to have to go through the whole thing to make corrections.
Noise gate works by setting a floor for your sound and removing all noise below that set threshold. It’ll therefore be good practice to accurately measure the noise floor level before applying noise gate to your audio recording.
Background noise can be a pain in the butt. Location noises, a low-quality microphone, or a random cell phone ring might ruin your YouTube videos, but they don’t have to. Adobe Audition makes many provisions for the resolution of background noises of different kinds and intensities.
You may already be familiar with the more common ones like Equalizer and Adaptive Reduction. In this guide, we discuss these Adobe Audition plugins and tools and how to use them to get the best out of your audio. Feel free to use as many as you like while you work, and don’t forget to tinker with the settings until you have as little background noise as possible. Happy editing!
