Old 03-29-2016, 09:02 AM   #1
Jazzooka
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Default Noise removal : ReaFIR rocks

Hi,

Maybe this is already known, but ReaFIR rocks in the denoisal department.

Recently, we recorded drums with an extra mike outside the room in the hall, sounded great, but when compressing the hell out of it, some AC hum popped back in the mix. Easing on the compression was not an option.

Tried our denoisal plugs and demoed some very respected ones - no names, this is not about them but about ReaFIR - without workable results, then I remembered ReaFIR had this subtract mode : bingo, noise was gone without sucking the life of the audio!

There was also a guitar track with a buzzing pedal power, put through ReaFIR : gone.

Folks, if you haven't tried ReaFIR yet for all your noise concerns, give it a try

Congrats to the devs!

Here is the method in a few steps :

* Choose "subtract" mode
* Enable "automatically build noise profile"
* Hit play at a section of audio with only the noise
* Disable "automatically..."
* Hit play and Bob's your uncle

Cheers
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Old 02-20-2018, 10:22 AM   #2
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Hi,
I did a search for "noise removal" and naturally stumbled on your post and tried the steps you describe but...something is not right?

I followed your 5 step procedure and I get a weird sound at the end...are you sure there aren't a few more steps involved?

In my experience with other noise removal software, once you make the noise print, you apply the removal to the file...I think this is the step missing but I can't figure out how to do that?
Thanks,
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Old 02-20-2018, 11:03 AM   #3
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I did the steps with an record armed track and it worked.
When I as a last step changed edit mode to 'smooth' it got even better.
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Old 02-20-2018, 11:18 AM   #4
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Ok, I sort of got it to work. The FFT was set to high and maybe my noise print wasn't very good so it had removed most of the audio, leaving that odd mangled sound.

However, I still don't understand how I apply the effect? Because if I simply disable ReaFIR, the noise comes back of course.
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Old 02-20-2018, 12:40 PM   #5
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I know Kenny has a video on using ReaFir but danged if I can find it!
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Old 02-20-2018, 01:42 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chumbo View Post
Ok, I sort of got it to work. The FFT was set to high and maybe my noise print wasn't very good so it had removed most of the audio, leaving that odd mangled sound.

However, I still don't understand how I apply the effect? Because if I simply disable ReaFIR, the noise comes back of course.
Jazzooka's 5 points are correct....

You don't disable the whole reaFIR plugin - you just untick the 'Enable automatically build noise profile' option and leave reAFIR active (and in Subtract mode)
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Old 02-20-2018, 03:30 PM   #7
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Old 02-20-2018, 03:41 PM   #8
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::::taking notes::::
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Old 02-21-2018, 03:37 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by uncleswede View Post
Jazzooka's 5 points are correct....

You don't disable the whole reaFIR plugin - you just untick the 'Enable automatically build noise profile' option and leave reAFIR active (and in Subtract mode)
As I said, I've got it figured it now so I know now the 5 points are correct, however, the wasn't the point of my last post you quoted.

My problem is, I don't know how to apply permanently the noise reduction to the file. So that, when I do remove the plugin completely, the file will still play with the noise reduction applied. Can't make it any clearer. As it is now, if I bypass the ReaFIR, I hear the noise return. I'd like to be able to deactivate ReaFIR and NOT hear the noise, i.e. apply the FX to the item.

In Action List I found 'Item: Apply track/take FX to items' but it's not a very elegant way of doing it since it creates another take on the same track. So I end up with one lane that has the original audio (No FX applied, i.e. with noise) and then the 2nd take (FX applied, i.e. noise removed).

I then have to delete the original take. I imagine there is a better way of doing this, right?
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Old 02-21-2018, 04:36 AM   #10
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You could make this Custom Action, to get rid of the unwanted Take:

Item: Apply track/take FX
Take: Crop to active take in items
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Old 02-21-2018, 08:20 AM   #11
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Ok, but the tails get messed up...

What happens is that it removes the noise according to the sound bit profile - and while you can notice the improvement - some of the signal you want to keep may also exist in the sound bit profile, so when you get to the tail of a signal (e.g. end of loud part towards a silence or end of the song) you can hear an artifact.

The artifact is spikes of sounds activating and deactivating (on/off) - all of which are occurring at very low sound levels. You really have to listen hard to hear it; mostly with headphones, but it's there... Very annoying because it is unnatural.

The best solution I found - and I wish someone would offer a better - is to automate ReaFir so it works less hard at very low sound levels (i.e. lets more of the noise through). But, this goes counter to the objective... This artifact may or may not exist depending on your noise profil and the song dynamic (i.e. loud to silence). But when it does - well... sometimes I prefer the noise to the artifact?!

Has anyone else noticed this? How did you lessen the artifact?
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Old 02-21-2018, 09:34 AM   #12
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Originally Posted by RDBOIS View Post
Ok, but the tails get messed up...

What happens is that it removes the noise according to the sound bit profile - and while you can notice the improvement - some of the signal you want to keep may also exist in the sound bit profile, so when you get to the tail of a signal (e.g. end of loud part towards a silence or end of the song) you can hear an artifact.

The artifact is spikes of sounds activating and deactivating (on/off) - all of which are occurring at very low sound levels. You really have to listen hard to hear it; mostly with headphones, but it's there... Very annoying because it is unnatural.

The best solution I found - and I wish someone would offer a better - is to automate ReaFir so it works less hard at very low sound levels (i.e. lets more of the noise through). But, this goes counter to the objective... This artifact may or may not exist depending on your noise profil and the song dynamic (i.e. loud to silence). But when it does - well... sometimes I prefer the noise to the artifact?!

Has anyone else noticed this? How did you lessen the artifact?
so then add an automation lane for the plugin's wet amount and deal with it on just the parts of the track were you want less
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Old 02-21-2018, 12:41 PM   #13
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Quote:
and I wish someone would offer a better - is to automate ReaFir so it works less hard at very low sound levels (i.e. lets more of the noise through).
Eyey-- well i dunno bout 'better' but try this-- make your profile @ highest fft size-- then switch to compressor mode and use same profile,but at a lower fft size.
You can then make an envelope lane for the compress ratio-- limiting compress at 100:1 <><><><><> upwards compress can be done for quiet parts using values from range of 0.2 >> 1.0 __ >beware< volume can greatly increase here! =)
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Old 02-21-2018, 04:35 PM   #14
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so then add an automation lane for the plugin's wet amount and deal with it on just the parts of the track were you want less
Yup .
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Old 02-21-2018, 04:43 PM   #15
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using param modulating wet/dry trick is a first step, but yes if you need to get surgical, getting it on an env lane as well as toying with compression feature can get you across the line:
also remember today we have basic spectral edits which can also do a good job alone or in combination with reafir.
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Old 02-22-2018, 01:59 PM   #16
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It's important to remember that all of these processes are essentially resynthesis. It analyzes your input over a finite amount of time and tries to represent by mixing a finite number of sines and cosines together. It's a fairly sophisticated form of resynthesis, so not as messy as some effects that are marketed as such, but all of these kinds of things (including a lot of well respected eq packages and spectral editing and anything that does pitch shifting or time stretching unless sometimes when it's both at the same time) are literally replacing your original audio with an approximation and then manipulating that.

Indeed, playing with a more naive and limited resythesizer can help to illustrate how and why we end up with audible artifacts when we try to push these processes too far.
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Old 02-23-2018, 12:10 AM   #17
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A cool trick to play with during noise removal with ReaFIR:
Ctrl-drag the entire noise profile (the red spectrum line) up & down to increase or decrease the amount of noise reduction. If you are hearing artifacts from the noise reduction, dragging it down a bit reduces them.
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Old 10-16-2019, 11:59 AM   #18
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Default ReaFir with L/R tracks?

Reaper experts, I am really just getting started in knowing all of Reaper's many (MANY!) capabilities. One such area is in using ReaFir to reduce unwanted noise from a track.

My ReaFir use case: stereo (Blumlein) microphone recording of a wind ensemble in a large hall, where the Facilities folks refused to turn off the air handler during the concert.

In this case, would I want to perform the noise sampling process on each of the two tracks using ReaFir, separately ?

The noise in this case is very low-freq ... subsonic really ... but it adds rumble and I'd like to remove it if possible. Thanks for any suggestions!
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Old 10-17-2019, 07:39 AM   #19
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Reaper experts, I am really just getting started in knowing all of Reaper's many (MANY!) capabilities. One such area is in using ReaFir to reduce unwanted noise from a track.

My ReaFir use case: stereo (Blumlein) microphone recording of a wind ensemble in a large hall, where the Facilities folks refused to turn off the air handler during the concert.

In this case, would I want to perform the noise sampling process on each of the two tracks using ReaFir, separately ?

The noise in this case is very low-freq ... subsonic really ... but it adds rumble and I'd like to remove it if possible. Thanks for any suggestions!

I would try using ReaFIR on both channels first. Since a Blumlein pair is closely spaced it would probably work fine. If it won't do the job, use 2 instances of FIR, one for each channel (selected by the in/out pin matrix on each plugin).
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Old 10-18-2019, 11:29 AM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chumbo View Post
Hi,
I did a search for "noise removal" and naturally stumbled on your post and tried the steps you describe but...something is not right?

I followed your 5 step procedure and I get a weird sound at the end...are you sure there aren't a few more steps involved?

In my experience with other noise removal software, once you make the noise print, you apply the removal to the file...I think this is the step missing but I can't figure out how to do that?
Thanks,
Depends on your standards...
If removing the noise is paramount with no regard to what's left of the program (muffled sounding and/or laden with artifacts), then ReaFIR works just like stated. If preserving fidelity of the original program is paramount (especially if this is music we're talking about and not just dialog), you might conclude that ReaFIR is much too crude of a tool to use for noise reduction.
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Old 10-18-2019, 12:02 PM   #21
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Serr is correct if you don't use the wet dry param mod trick mentioned earlier. #7
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Old 10-18-2019, 02:33 PM   #22
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chumbo

When you have achieved the level of bad audio you want on your wave track with
Reafir route that track to another clear track and press record on the new track (get the level of record you want right, beforehand )
So now you have the track recorded with that FX Reafir so substitute the old one with the new and exit Refir.
I would just slide the first original track along to past the end of your tune to keep it if you need it.

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Old 10-21-2019, 05:59 PM   #23
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Originally Posted by chumbo View Post
As I said, I've got it figured it now so I know now the 5 points are correct, however, the wasn't the point of my last post you quoted.

My problem is, I don't know how to apply permanently the noise reduction to the file. So that, when I do remove the plugin completely, the file will still play with the noise reduction applied. Can't make it any clearer. As it is now, if I bypass the ReaFIR, I hear the noise return. I'd like to be able to deactivate ReaFIR and NOT hear the noise, i.e. apply the FX to the item.

In Action List I found 'Item: Apply track/take FX to items' but it's not a very elegant way of doing it since it creates another take on the same track. So I end up with one lane that has the original audio (No FX applied, i.e. with noise) and then the 2nd take (FX applied, i.e. noise removed).

I then have to delete the original take. I imagine there is a better way of doing this, right?
There's no need to 'apply' it, like Adobe Audition or similar ones, just set it as the first plugin in the FX, tweak it (ctrl-click on the graph to set to amount subtracted), and forget it. It works in real time, unlike most other noise removal techniques.
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