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I have a poetry reading with that darned "room" echo in it. I'm clueless about how to minimize it. Any suggestions would be useful.

Oh, I have iZotope RX (already used it to remove a high pitched hum in the audio) so if anyone knows settings they'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate that also.

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I would have a look at Sonnox Oxford Transient Modulator

http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugin ... ansmod.htm

It has a great way of dealing with ambience and transients. I have never tried it on a voice, but I have experienced dramatic effects on instruments and drums. It is similar to the SPL Transient Designer, or the Logic Enveloper. Sonnox have a demo available if you have an iLok.

Of course nothing is going to be completely successful if the speech is fast and a lot of words are run together.

kind regards

Stephen

Sometimes I can work miracles with a simple gate

dickhauser wrote:I have a poetry reading with that darned "room" echo in it. I'm clueless about how to minimize it. Any suggestions would be useful.

Oh, I have iZotope RX (already used it to remove a high pitched hum in the audio) so if anyone knows settings they'd be willing to share, I'd appreciate that also.

Yep, use a gate, but as a downward expander - experiment with the threshold and you'll be surprised how much natural pre-delay and reverb you'll lose.

i'd even try some xnoise to see what other room ambience you can kill with it.

Multiband expansion (Waves C4) can do some pretty cool noise-reduction, and might give a cleaner result than a simple expander.

Try a notch EQ to cut out some of the specific room tone. Use a really fast gate. If it sounds to hard and cuts off the voice to fast, add a very very very small room fx.
Maybe cut off the room by hand very sharp and add the room fx.
Don´t compress to much.

Hope something helps...

The easiest, cheapest and quickest method would be to gate the spoken word, IMHO.
The release time will be critical for the ambience-removal effect.

Remember that you don't need a 100% (full-range) gating; by reducing the reduction amount from infinity to something barely audible, you'll lessen any unnatural artifacts imposed by the gate itself.

monkey man wrote:The easiest, cheapest and quickest method would be to gate the spoken word, IMHO.
The release time will be critical for the ambience-removal effect.

Remember that you don't need a 100% (full-range) gating; by reducing the reduction amount from infinity to something barely audible, you'll lessen any unnatural artifacts imposed by the gate itself.

...And then you put everything into a room using Altiverb to make sure it sounds natural...

Correct, Dwet! Just be sure to select the correct room.

Or, if your deadline's flexible, you could wait for DP's new-fangled converb.

This is were WAVELAB comes in and can help u. PC only yes, but still WAVELAB has unique features.
Wavelab 6 can take away room acoustics.. and does it well too.
Check out Steinbergs home page. I think the mid-level-priced Wavelab Studio 6, for just not too much money, offers this great feature.
Forget about Steinbergs other software.
WAVELAB is so different anything else. And it´s VERY intuitive!!!
For me I use it mostly for post production for converting, editing and mastering, ISRC, UPC/EAN, CD text coding, Leveling, production sheets and prepairing CDs for production. Also radioshow editing and broadcast converting. The more u use it the more u need it.

DP and Wavelab work side by side in a perfect combination in my studio.

Radiogal wrote:This is were WAVELAB comes in and .... The more u use it the more u need it.

DP and Wavelab work side by side in a perfect combination in my studio.

WAVELAB ROCKS! There's nothing like it on MAC unfortunately.

I work a lot on voices rather than music. Some files/tapes I get has the problem you are having. I do the gating as many suggested here and add a hair of room reverb to it. The end result would be a voice sound that is natural, not the usual super dry sound and the reverb masks unnatural gating. The reverb needs to be real sounding room or small hall, maybe in your case. The trick is it should not sound the reverb is added at all. It should sound as if he/she is talking in an acoustically nice space with very little room sound.

Good luck!

WAVES R-Vox has beside the special narrowing/comp/boost effect also a great gate function that can tighten up the voice very well from room acoustics. I always use this feature working with projects like audio books.