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Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

sr.ht

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Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is a bit poor. The original data is available for download (with more info about the entire process, most of which is outside of my grasp as I am not an ML person) in the demo blog post: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ (towards the bottom of the page)

Any idea about the license for the original data?

The paper links to the McGill TSP speech database (English & French) as one of the sources of the data, which claims to be BSD licensed:

http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/Documents/Data/

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is a bit poor. The original data is available for download (with more info about the entire process, most of which is outside of my grasp as I am not an ML person) in the demo blog post: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ (towards the bottom of the page)

Any idea about the license for the original data?

The other source of data mentioned in the paper is the NTT Multi-Lingual Speech Database for Telephonometry, which seems to be commercial, so presumably under a proprietary license.

https://www.ntt-at.com/product/multilingual/ https://www.ntt-at.com/product/speech2002/

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is a bit poor. The original data is available for download (with more info about the entire process, most of which is outside of my grasp as I am not an ML person) in the demo blog post: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ (towards the bottom of the page)

Any idea about the license for the original data?

Hmm, OTOH, the 6.4GB data tarball says that it is from contributors who responded to the demo and is licensed under CC0.

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#14
post #6

Ever since I got a new microphone I've been having issues with large quantities of background noise, primarily typing sounds, leaking in through my microphone. A friend of mine had told me about rnnoise, describing it as "very good" at removing noise, so I decided to test it. My initial testing started by me piping raw PCM from arecord through rnnoises denoiser demo into aplay. The results frankly shocked me. When no…

Hey, thanks for building this! There are multiple options like this for Pulseaudio, but last I researched it nothing for pure ALSA. On a system without Pulseaudio this is obviously better, great to have. The pulseaudio plugins like noisetorch have the issue of significant system load even without current sound input (something about how the loopback works iirc), will this alsa plugin share that issue or will the syst…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#15
rnnoise is fantastic. I use it in an Equalizer APO filter chain on my gaming machine along with an EQ and compressor which are fed from a dynamic mic. I consistently get comments about the quality of my mic setup in-game and on Discord.

The best part is that it has almost no impact on voice quality, unlike Krisp and some other options I have tried. Singing into the filter chain even sounds good, with the exception of when my 5 year old daughter joins in. rnnnoise seems to think that her voice is noise and tries to intermittently filter it out, which causes a volume warble while we sing together. To be fair, 99.9% of the time her voice should definitely be considered noise I want filtered out. ;)

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#16

Ever since I got a new microphone I've been having issues with large quantities of background noise, primarily typing sounds, leaking in through my microphone. A friend of mine had told me about rnnoise, describing it as "very good" at removing noise, so I decided to test it. My initial testing started by me piping raw PCM from arecord through rnnoises denoiser demo into aplay. The results frankly shocked me. When no…

I'm intrigued by this. I've never been really satisfied with any software noise reduction system, but this sounds like a phenomenal improvement.

Tried installing it on Ubuntu LTS via latest pulseeffects, but it seems like it switched to pipewire 0.3 which is not available yet so I can't really run it.

My solution so far has been a headset with a boom microphone, like the CoolerMaster MH630 (one of the better boom mics, see https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/cooler-master/mh63... for a sound demo at the "Recording quality" section). When it comes to noise reduction, bringing the microphone as close to the mouth as possible is a really good way to get an amazing SNR boost immediately (even for omnidirectional mics). Unfortunately that's a pain with large capsule condenser microphones (unless you're ready to have a large boom arm hanging about on your desk and accept view obstruction, and you add postprocessing to remove the very bassy proximity effect)

Another benefit of headsets with boom mics is consistency (without DSP). No matter how you move, the distance and angle to the microphone is always identical, and therefore the sound is very consistent (save for your own personal loudness)

You can of course add DSP (limiter, noise reduction etc) to that, but the better input you provide, the better output you get.

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is a bit poor. The original data is available for download (with more info about the entire process, most of which is outside of my grasp as I am not an ML person) in the demo blog post: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ (towards the bottom of the page)

Any idea about the license for the original data?

So far we have 3 ideas!

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#18
post #6

Ever since I got a new microphone I've been having issues with large quantities of background noise, primarily typing sounds, leaking in through my microphone. A friend of mine had told me about rnnoise, describing it as "very good" at removing noise, so I decided to test it. My initial testing started by me piping raw PCM from arecord through rnnoises denoiser demo into aplay. The results frankly shocked me. When no…

Hey, thanks for building this! There are multiple options like this for Pulseaudio, but last I researched it nothing for pure ALSA. On a system without Pulseaudio this is obviously better, great to have. The pulseaudio plugins like noisetorch have the issue of significant system load even without current sound input (something about how the loopback works iirc), will this alsa plugin share that issue or will the syst…

The plugin uses very little CPU, and is entirely inactive when not in use (i.e. when data isn't being pulled => the transfer function isn't being called) due to how ALSA works

EDIT: Do note, though, that each process pulling audio will be denoising independently, so the usage scales linearly with the amount of clients. This is due to how ALSA plugins work, but regardless of that, on a Ryzen 5 1600x (the only CPU I can test on), the plugin uses 2.5% of a single core when recording mono 48k

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#19
post #5

Ever since I got a new microphone I've been having issues with large quantities of background noise, primarily typing sounds, leaking in through my microphone. A friend of mine had told me about rnnoise, describing it as "very good" at removing noise, so I decided to test it. My initial testing started by me piping raw PCM from arecord through rnnoises denoiser demo into aplay. The results frankly shocked me. When no…

A few weeks ago, I tried doing this with the LADSPA version of RNNoise and ALSA, but couldn't get it to work reliably. I have also experimented with NoiseTorch which routes the microphone through LADSPA using Pulseaudio but it didn't work reliably either. The biggest problem with this is that Pulseaudio will load one CPU thread 100% even when no audio input. This makes it a deal breaker for laptops. I will definitely…

I believe Pulse also has a LADSPA module that you could try.

Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA

#20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is a bit poor. The original data is available for download (with more info about the entire process, most of which is outside of my grasp as I am not an ML person) in the demo blog post: https://jmvalin.ca/demo/rnnoise/ (towards the bottom of the page)

Also any idea if the training required nvidia GPUs or was it done on CPUs or GPUs with non-proprietary drivers?

There is training instructions in the repository. The training scripts appear to be using some pretty standard ML libraries (I'm seeing keras and mentions of tensorflow), so I imagine that the requirements are the same as those.

I don't feel I'm qualified to elaborate on this specifically, again, I'm no ML person. For more info look here: https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise/tree/master/training https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise/blob/master/TRAINING-README

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