If you're using Windows, I recently found it this small tool to reduce background and keyboard/mouse noises: https://closedlooplabs.com. It's not open source as far as I'm aware but way cheaper than krisp.ai's subscription model.
Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#22If you're using Windows, I recently found it this small tool to reduce background and keyboard/mouse noises: https://closedlooplabs.com . It's not open source as far as I'm aware but way cheaper than krisp.ai's subscription model.
It is possible to use VST2 on Windows. This way you get RNNoise and the advantages of Free software.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
+1, that data is CC0, and I believe that's all the data that was used for training.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#24Is there any RNNoise based alternative for MacOS? I managed to install the plug-in but find it hard to pipeline the audio into it.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#25Sound engineer here.
RNNoise is an amazing feat, but please, don't overdo it. Most of the time, you don't really want complete ambient noise elimination, as human speech appearing from dead silence sounds unnatural. Moreover, most noise reduction software is considerably less effective in reducing noise during a person speaking, either removing too much, producing degraded speech sound (worst case) or too little. If it's possible, always start adding your noise reduction gradually, stop when it sounds good to your ear and then back up a bit.
If you're doing voice recording/streaming, please, get to know Expanding and Compression first, and only after configuring your sound processing chain add noise reduction in.
On of the serious offenders is OBS studio, which recently added RNNoise filter, but provides no means of mixing processed sound with the dry one (in other words, filter is always 100% on). Wet/Dry mix knob is heavily needed for most filters there.
I'm very saddened by the state of sound quality in lots of amazing videos people have been producing lately and now I'm considering writing a guide for voice processing for streams/conferences/etc for the techy people, if anyone's interested.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#26Sound engineer here. RNNoise is an amazing feat, but please, don't overdo it. Most of the time, you don't really want complete ambient noise elimination, as human speech appearing from dead silence sounds unnatural. Moreover, most noise reduction software is considerably less effective in reducing noise during a person speaking, either removing too much, producing degraded speech sound (worst case) or too little. If…
I'd be quite interested in such an article, again, my goal (besides VoIP) is screencasting and/or streaming, so any bit of advice someone with experience might have is greatly useful.
I'll look into expansion and compression, and I could implement a wet/dry setting that multiplies the source samples and then mixes them into the result, if I understood the concept right.
EDIT: RNNoise seems to be alright when it comes to canceling noise during speech too, I didn't notice it overdoing it.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#27Sound engineer here. RNNoise is an amazing feat, but please, don't overdo it. Most of the time, you don't really want complete ambient noise elimination, as human speech appearing from dead silence sounds unnatural. Moreover, most noise reduction software is considerably less effective in reducing noise during a person speaking, either removing too much, producing degraded speech sound (worst case) or too little. If…
Great post.
I'm also an audio engineer. This is the truth.
In an audio recording featuring spoken voice, there are two sounds present in every recording: the spoken voice, and the room ambiance in the background. We typically will refer to the latter as "room tone."
Even though we don't usually explicitly realize this, our ears/brain implicitly do. So, when people overdo noise removal, we implicitly hear the difference since half of the sounds that compose your filtered output are now gone. We tend to associate such recognizable "noise gating" with lower production quality and we find that generally such processing leads to lower intelligibility of the human voice.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
Excellent.
I'm testing this right now and am noticing that some more info about the installation could be helpful. Specifically, when installing rnnoise as shown in the readme it of course goes to /usr/local/lib, but /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig was not in the PKG_CONFIG_PATH of my distro. Maybe there could be a hint to set that when calling `meson build` if rnnoise can't be found?
Packaging software is always annoying, sorry for dragging you into that mud. Ideally distros will pick it up and compiling manually unnecessary. I would have left this as an issue but saw no issue tracker on the project page.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#29Sound engineer here. RNNoise is an amazing feat, but please, don't overdo it. Most of the time, you don't really want complete ambient noise elimination, as human speech appearing from dead silence sounds unnatural. Moreover, most noise reduction software is considerably less effective in reducing noise during a person speaking, either removing too much, producing degraded speech sound (worst case) or too little. If…
I'd be quite interested in such an article, again, my goal (besides VoIP) is screencasting and/or streaming, so any bit of advice someone with experience might have is greatly useful. I'll look into expansion and compression, and I could implement a wet/dry setting that multiplies the source samples and then mixes them into the result, if I understood the concept right. EDIT: RNNoise seems to be alright when it comes…
> I could implement a wet/dry setting that multiplies the source samples and then mixes them into the result, if I understood the concept right.
Haven't tested your version yet, but werman/noise-suppression-for-voice plugin introduces some delay and dumb wet/dry control (or mixing with original sound source in some other way) doesn't work, so it might turn out to be not so simple.
Re: Show HN: Alsa_rnnoise – RNNoise-based noise removal plugin for ALSA
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
Excellent. I'm testing this right now and am noticing that some more info about the installation could be helpful. Specifically, when installing rnnoise as shown in the readme it of course goes to /usr/local/lib, but /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig was not in the PKG_CONFIG_PATH of my distro. Maybe there could be a hint to set that when calling `meson build` if rnnoise can't be found? Packaging software is always annoying,…
There's an issue tracker on that page, under tickets, but I'd prefer if you took a discussion to the attached mailing list first before it hits the official tracker.
As for packaging, that's my field of work for some projects I'm working on so it's not unfamiliar to me, the only problem is that the RNNoise upstream lacks releases, although there's discussion about something happening about that.