Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to my channel, Jennifer Marie Vio, where I teach you different ways to make money online. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to my channel for more videos related to working from home. So many of my videos focus on making money by transcribing audio to text for different companies. And many times you'll get a file where the audio is really difficult to understand. Maybe this is because the audio file is really quiet and you can't hear it even on maximum volume. Or there's a lot of static and background noise in the background. Or maybe the speaker is just talking too quickly for you to understand what they're saying. So if you encounter any of these issues, there is a way to improve the audio quality, remove background noise, amplify the audio and even slow it down so you can transcribe it accurately. You might even want to do this step before you run the audio through an audio to text software tool like otter.ai. And make sure to check out my tutorial on that in the description below. So the software will transcribe your file for you more accurately. We're going to do all of this with a free audio editor called Audacity. You can download this using a Windows or Mac computer or laptop. So let's go ahead and go to audacityteam.org. Then click on Download. And from the drop down list, you can choose Windows or Mac. So let's click Windows. Now at the time of this video creation, the most recent version of Audacity is 2.3.3. So just click on the Audacity 2.3.3 installer. And this will direct you to Fosshub.com where the download files are hosted. So then scroll down and click on the Audacity Windows Installer or Mac depending on your operating system. Then click Save File and proceed to follow the instructions on your computer to install Audacity. Now I already have it installed. So I'll go ahead and open it up on my computer. Okay, so this is what Audacity looks like when you open it up. It might seem a little intimidating at first, but it's actually really simple to use. And for this demonstration, I'm going to demonstrate how to clean up audio using a file recorded by my grandfather many, many years ago on a cassette player that I recently converted to MP3. Now to do this, you'll need to download the file from whatever platform you're using, but it can be in any audio file format. What we're going to do is go to File, then click Import, and then click Audio. So now you're going to locate on your computer the file that you want to clean up or improve the audio quality. Click the file, and then click Open. Okay, so I've just imported this file. And as you can see, there's not very big sound waves. It's actually really quiet. But what I want to do is I'm going to click on this Zoom tool, and then click on the file to zoom in a little bit. And I'm just going to preview the quality of this audio so you can see the before and after of what we're going to do. So I'm just going to click if this here is the Selection tool. So if you just click anywhere on the audio, you can start playing it. And then you can press the Play button, or you can also press the spacebar on your computer to press Play. So I'm going to play like 10 seconds

Speaker 2: of this so you can hear. Okay, so you can hear it's really quiet and really difficult. This was

Speaker 1: recorded decades ago, over 10 years ago. So we need to first of all, I want to make this louder. So what we're going to do is press Ctrl A on your keyboard. And as you can see, now it's highlighted. So I'm going to click off. And again, Ctrl A, it's all highlighted. Then we're going to go to Effect, and then click Amplify. And here, I want to make the amplification to minus three dB. So this amplified at 12. So just put it to minus three, then click OK. And as you can see, now it's going to be much louder. So let's go back, press Play again.

Speaker 2: Okay, so it's much louder, which is good, but we still have this background noise that we don't want

Speaker 1: this right here. So what we need to do to remove the background noise is to select a sample of the background noise. And then we're going to basically tell Audacity, hey, I want you to remove everything that sounds like this. So let's go to the very beginning. And then we're going to go to the very beginning. That's a good little sample, try to make it as long as possible. But maybe in your clip, it might just be a small little sample of static. Or if you have one that's longer, try to go as long as you can. So let's try this here. So as you can see, I've used the selection tool to select this portion of audio. And then I'm going to click Effect, I'm going to go to Noise Reduction, select that, then click Get Noise Profile. Okay, so now that's basically told Audacity, this is the profile of the noise that we want to remove. So now, we want to click Ctrl A again to select the entire clip, go back to Effect, back to Noise Reduction. And then just click OK. And it's as you do you see how it did that it went through the entire file, and it's removed this background noise. So let's press Play now and see if we can see a difference between before and after.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clover.

Speaker 1: Okay, so you can see it's removed a lot of that noise, there's still a bit of a hum in the background. So we can even try to do it again if we want. So I'm going to try another time, Get Noise Profile and do the same thing again. See if we can clean up the audio even more. And as you can see, it's still removing even more for us. So you can see the difference between before and after. Another time while living in the... And if you want to keep trying throughout the clip different noise profiles to remove that static-y background sound, you can keep doing that. Now let's try to amplify it again. You can even make it a little bit louder if you want. Now let's press Play again and see what that sounds like.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff and dry. So you can try to even make this louder if you want.

Speaker 1: There might be a maximum of how loud you can make this. I believe the loudest you can make this is at the new peak amplitude of zero. So this is as loud as we can make this. And as you see, that's because they don't want these sound waves peaking.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clover.

Speaker 1: Okay. So let's say I was like, I don't really understand what he's saying. And I want to make this go a little bit slower. What you can do if that's your issue is you can again, click Control A, then go back to Effect. And we're going to click Change Tempo. And what this will do is it will change the tempo without changing the pitch. Okay. So what you can do is scroll this down. And now let's click on Preview to see what it'll sound like.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house.

Speaker 1: So what you can see is that has made it slower. So we can understand even more. So you can even go down further if you want to make it even slower. Another time while living in the same house. Okay. And then all you have to do is click OK. So now I'm going to zoom out. This file before, if I go Edit, Undo, you can see the length. Right now it's a minute 35 seconds. If I go Undo, the original file was a minute and 15. So it has stretched it out a bit. I'm going to go Redo.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clovers.

Speaker 1: Okay. So that has made it much slower. So we can even understand it better. And now I'm going to click on Undo because I don't need it to be any slower. I just wanted to clean up the background noise. And what you can do if you want to save this as an MP3 file, because maybe now you want to put it in otter.ai and transcribe it. So it's clearer for otter.ai or another transcription software to transcribe it to text. You can click File, Export, and then choose Export as MP3 or Export as WAV file. And then we can go, I'll just put this result. Save. Okay. Okay. So now I want to play the before and after result of just doing that quick little audio cleanup. So let's play, press play on the first one.

Speaker 2: Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clover, some 10 acres of the stuff and dry. Another time while living in the same house, the fields were covered with sweet clover,

Speaker 1: some 10 acres of the stuff and dry. Okay. So that is me cleaning up the background noise and increasing the volume of the clip. And also, of course you can change the speed as I showed you, but this is just with the same speed of the first one, just with cleaning up the background noise. Okay. So I really hope you enjoy this tutorial and I hope that this helps you in transcribing and understanding what the people are saying in these files that you are transcribing. If you liked this video, please click like, and make sure to subscribe to my channel for more videos on how to make money online and more transcription tips. Thank you very much for watching. Transcribed by https://otter.ai