[PLUG] Audio normalization / static removal in Linux

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Mon Oct 18 16:26:46 UTC 2010


I apologize for the tangential nature of this post, but I am hoping
for a linux-based solution and I don't know where else to ask right
now.

I have a video of a talk that is spattered with very loud,
ear-wrenching, bursts of static at random intervals.  There are quite
a few of these bursts (on average, probably one every 20-30 seconds),
and they are at least one order of magnitude louder than the important
audio.  It seems like it should be a simple matter to normalize the
volume so that it is possible to listen to the audio. I've come to
terms with the fact that the underlying audio is lost during these
bursts of static, but I would at least like to make it possible to
listen to the stream without blasting static randomly.

Does anyone know how to do this? I've stripped the audio and played
with it in audacity, but I don't know enough to make the options do
what needs done -- the best I've been able to do is to generate a
noise profile for a section of static, then use that to reduce the
static of each individual section.  This requires manually selecting
the portion of the audio wave that corresponds to the burst of static
and re-running the noise filter for *every* burst.  That simply
doesn't scale to the full length of the video--it would be easier to
simply re-record the talk (which would loose audience commentary,
etc...).

I would be very appreciative of any suggestions or pointers to audio
editing communities that may be able to help.  I also have a short
sample of the video I could share off-list if you'd like to take a
closer look.

Thanks!
Rogan



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