Small project need help please!!!

[nickname009]

I'm making this sort of "song" full of noises, like stomp. it consists of 5 sounds:
1. sketching (the sound of it, when a pencil scratches the pad)
2. a woman tic (some sort of stretching/breathing exercise)
3. a woman practicing her facial reactions making bird-like noises
4. a woman practicing a C major scale with a piano (plays note, then sings, repeats)
5. a guy playing the C major scale descending

Now the problem I have is that I used a nice mic, but had to improv on the recording, an at3035 --> behringer mixer --> hand recorder (that journalists use)

hand recorder-->into line out of sound card converted to wav file, imported to tracktion

Now, all I need to do is to be able to cut all the background/ambient noises in these recordings, can someone or a couple of ppl please tell me what to do!!! Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!!!

[koolkeys]

There are any number of noise removal plug-ins available. Bias makes a lite version of Sound Soap for about $80.

Or you could try the Adobe Audition demo. It has a great noise removal plug-in. And it's functional for 30 days, I believe.

For free, you can try Audacity. It's a free audio editor with a noise removal plug-in. However, I liked the results of Audition better.

Good luck!

Koolkeys

[Lunch Money]

Audition's noise removal is pretty outstanding. There's also Acoustica, which I demoed front-to-back with Audition and was quite impressed with. Fully functional 30-day trial on that one, and cheap if you decide to buy.

Both of those, plus the Audacity mentioned by Koolkeys, use spectral removal, which means that if you go TOO aggressively, you can and will remove some of the frequencies from the spoken words, making them sound phased or otherwise 'weird'. But you can adjust the sensitivity, and if you manage to remove quite a bit without damaging the performances, you can always get rid of the leading and trailing 'silences' (in quotes because there will still be some background noise) with an expander/gate. I recommend the Floorfish by Digital Fishphones.

[enviso]

this is probablly not helpful at all, but;
why do you want to cut all the background noises? i would suggest looking at exploiting it instead.
background noise and tape hiss can add interest.

i much prefer the sound of a noisy hissy but 'full' recording to one with no "background noise" but lots of weird digital artifacts and that strange slightly hollow sound that noise reduction always seems to give.

unless it's very very minimal noise i have never been very happy with the results of noise reduction effects.

maybe there's some super duper noise reduction plug-in i haven't used, that's entirely possible.

[haydxn]

i frequently make songs out of recorded sounds, and i find that the effect of the background noise it pretty much negligible when it's all together - i have only rubbish microphones, and yet it doesn't seem to sound too bad.

of course, if i was using a single long sample the noise is more likely to be audible, but if you're clever with the layering/arrangement, and you actually have gaps and variety in level, then it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

that's what i think anyway..

A song made using only an iron! (and tracktion)

[C00kie]

Ehmm... trim the sound clips, so you only are left with the "interesting" bits and not the background noise when its supposed to be silent? Or insert a noise gate as an effect?