2019-02-08 20:53:55

I've been wondering about this for a while now and searched a bit here and there, but with no great success.
OK, let's say I encounter the situation.
I'm happily mixing sounds, like chemicals in a lab with my sound editor, but at one point I go one command too far and insert 1 extra sound and now the hole thing sounds awful, and since I thought it'd sound nice, I saved and closed it.
Now, I'd want an app that I can give it that 1 sound that I didn't want in the source file, and this app will remove that sound from the source.
Does anyone know of an app / add-on that can do this?
Thanks.

2019-02-08 21:04:13

audacity, gold wave, WavePad Sound Editor. thees are the programs which that i'm doing sound cutting with them

2019-02-08 21:08:05

If the sound is mixed in to the point where the original can't be obtained anymore, you're out of luck. This is why you should save multiple versions for backup purposes like this one.

2019-02-08 21:21:55

You can try splitting the file in gold wav. Sometimes it can take a part mixed files. Not always though.

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2019-02-08 21:36:20

Only way it can is if there is enough space (not much, but just enough) between the sounds. If they are cross mixed you are truly out of luck.

2019-02-08 21:39:29

It should be possible if you have the both the mixed file and the file you want to remove. Maybe someone could write an audacity plugin, if they haven't already? If you can identify where the offending file begins, all the better.
However, this is assuming these are the same encoding. If you mixed an MP3 into a wav, or a wav into an MP3, or two wavs at different sample rates, or already saved the mixed file in a lossy format, then you're in trouble.

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2019-02-08 22:25:53

Well, I don't use Audasity.
I'm currently making kind of battle sounds, with lots of weapon sounds thrown in.
In theory, I guess you could remove every trace of it with some kind of program though...

2019-02-08 23:19:49

In audio theory, there is this concept that any sound can be broken down to it's constituent sine waves. Meaning that every sound we know of is nothing but sine waves stacked on top of one another. It's a weird concept to get to grips with because even simple wave forms like saw waves do not sound like sine waves, until you start playing with filters and you clip all but one or two frequencies out, then it does. Let's say that your first sound covers frequencies from 110Hz to 5500Hz or 5.5KHz. That doesn't mean that the sound has components on all of the frequencies that lie in that range, that'd be chaotic. Sound 2 covers 400 to 9500. Now you mix those sounds together, and you likely have areas where the frequencies overlap, like some part of your first sound might be at 592.829, and your second sound could have something at 593.150, no they aren't exactly overlapping, but so close that they're going to influence one another. What you're asking to do therefore, is find all the frequencies of sound 2, and remove them from sound 1, after the chances of the merge have been written to disk. The problem is, even if such a thing were possible (which it may or may not be) it is very likely going to contaminate the results, because you're removing frequencies the two sounds shared. Here's an experiment you can try, it assumes you know what the second sound is, i.e. it's full path on your drive. If you don't know that, you're in trouble. If you do, go ahead and open your mix in goldwave, then open your second sound in goldwave. Copy the entire second sound to the clipboard, then control tab to the mix. Go into effects >> filters >> noise reduction, and choose the clipboard preset, then hit F4 to preview. How does it sound. I'm willing to bet that it removes the second sound, or most of it, but also that it degrades the quality of the original sound moderately to severely.

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2019-02-09 00:31:32

If I understand my sound theory correctly, here's another way of doing it.

This assumes several things:

1. All sound files in question are lossless, and at the same sample rate, bit rate, mono/stereo, etc.

2. The unwanted sound starts at the beginning of the mixed file, or at a position you can determine *exactly* as in, right down to the sample.

3. The unwanted sound plays all the way through, *exactly* as it is in its original file, with no skips, repeats, speed changes, etc. Or if it doesn't, you still have a copy of your edits to the file, or can recreate them *exactly*.

If all this is true, in theory you should be able to take a copy of the unwanted sound and invert it, which puts it out of phase. Then, mix the new, out of phase copy of the unwanted sound into your mix. If everything works the way it should and if everything is just right, the in phase unwanted sound (the one you wanted to get rid of) and the out of phase unwanted sound should cancel each other out, resulting in no more unwanted sound in your mix.

Hope this helps.

2019-02-09 03:11:11

Interesting theory, and it should work as you say, if everything is exactly the same, if it is even a little bit off, it will not work.

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End racism
End division
Become united

2019-02-09 03:50:56

While we're on the topic of goldwave, has anyone ever encountered an clipping issue? When raising the volume of something in this program, eventually it will reach the loudness I want it at, but when I save the file and listen in another media player, it sounds extremely overamplified. But, it sounds just fine in goldwave.

-
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2019-02-09 04:54:12

@10: basically what I was hinting at smile . Programattically, I was thinking one could go through and subtract the offending sound from the mix, which is the same as mixing the inverse, except mixing probably deals with errory things like overflow and whatnot, so mixing the inverse is probably better. But, again, exact timing and matching formats.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2019-02-09 14:25:40 (edited by defender 2019-02-09 14:26:20)

Yep I've encountered that, mostly with .oggs.
Helps to tune your sound editor's volume and media player's volume to the same level by ear though.

2019-02-09 21:51:39

Thanks, I gotta try that.

2019-02-11 18:40:44

Wooooo, I used the Gold wave filter remove noise, and the result is absolutely! horrendous! It makes a nice factory beeping ambiance. Besides that, you'd never know that it was once a battle sound with earthquakes, catapults and other stuff.
At least I didn't save it though.
It was just funny though, I was like, whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat! That thing is my sound?
Thx for the help again. big_smile

2019-02-11 20:26:23

er yeah, can we fix the loudness problem on goldwave, an option, or something, its verry anoying aspecialy if you forgot to save and when you save an open up your file on an other player, bye bye, booom boom, crackle crackle, all broken

2019-02-11 22:32:31

Oh, does anyone know how I can pan a sound reliably in Gold wave?
I.E move parts or all of a sound to the left or right, or mix a sound into the left or right? So far I've been switching between channels and mixing / pasting sounds in separately, but I can't modify it after that.
Thanks
@16, I didn't experience such a thing yet.

2019-02-13 04:37:37

Wow, interesting topic. Looks like I'm a little late to the party. I will be responding mainly to the original post as well as Jaybird and Ironcross, who I think have brought up really interesting points. First though, I should probably mention something that could prevent this sort of mess in the first place.

keithwipf1 wrote:

I'm happily mixing sounds, like chemicals in a lab with my sound editor, but at one point I go one command too far and insert 1 extra sound and now the hole thing sounds awful, and since I thought it'd sound nice, I saved and closed it.
Now, I'd want an app that I can give it that 1 sound that I didn't want in the source file, and this app will remove that sound from the source.

I've been there more than once, and it isn't fun.

Most editors like Gold Wave, Wave Pad etc. are destructive, and what you have described is precisely the main downside to destructive editing. In destructive editing, applying an effect will make a new temporary copy of the data with the result. Most editors have an undo feature, which reverts back to the previous copy. When you save the file, you are essentially committing to whatever copy of the file that was open at the time, and erasing the temporary copies that got you here. The only way to revert any changes after saving is to start from an earlier saved copy, and if you didn't make one, you'll have to start over I'm afraid. For this reason I really do not recommend destructive editing when working on complex projects. You always run the risk of committing to something too soon and not being able to go back and revise it.

I think for these kinds of things you should use a DAW that is non-destructive. I use Reaper, which is very accessible with the Osara add-on, though it's a bit of a learning curve, and I am not too proficient in using it yet. but I'm getting there.

Reaper, as well as most other DAWs so far as I know, are non-destructive. In non-destructive editing, everything you do happens as the files are played. The audio is read from disc, and processed in realtime. Because of this, you can review and change things to your heart's content and instantly hear the results. When you perform a save operation, you are only saving a file telling the program the steps that got you here (this is often known as a project file). You can edit your project as much as you like. You could, for instance, decide that you don't like a particular reverb, or you don't like a particular sound. No problem. Just take the offending thing out of your project and replace it with something else. When you are really finished tinkering, you can make what is called a render, which is just a single wav or other audio file that reflects all your work. But even after rendering, you can still tinker with your project, and if you find something you like better, just make a new render. The only way to really get screwed over is to lose your project file.

Now because destructive and non-destructive are internally very different, some tasks are more suited for one than the other. And Gold Wave is still easier to use and learn, so I'm not at all suggesting that you shouldn't use it. But for the problem you're facing, non-destructive editing will make your life easier if you can get to grips with an editor that works that way.

Now for actually removing and isolating sounds. I've been experimenting with this for a while now. It's one of those topics that fascinate me. I've found that there are basically two types of sound removal: inverting, and what I call carving.

Jaybird in post 9 explained inverting very well. You basically take the sound you want to remove and invert it. Gold Wave has an invert effect for this purpose. It won't sound any different when you do this, but trust me, it does do something. Now, mix that inverted copy on top of your file containing many sounds. The inverted copy has to be at the exact same time and volume for this to work. If it works though, the sound will be removed without a trace!

This is purely a mathematical binary operation, so it *only* works if the sound you are trying to remove is exactly identical to the sound in the mixed file. Thus, the two have to be exactly the same volume and at exactly the same time. And anything that could change one or both files, such as clipping, distortion, effect differences, lossy file compression (mp3, ogg, wma etc.), or anything else will make the inverting trick less effective, and as a result, remnants of the sound will be left behind.

Now the method I sort of call carving. Ironcross mentioned it when he said that a sound is essentially a sum of sine waves and that you can remove one sound from another by removing the sine waves of the unwanted sound. He is right in saying that it can degrade the quality moderately to severely. However, using Gold Wave's noise reduction, or any general noise reduction tool for that matter, demonstrates nothing. Noise reduction tools rely on static snapshots of a short sample of background noise which they will remove from the file. The less the background noise changes, the better. The more it changes, the worse the result.

For instance, if a sound you want to remove started off at a low pitch and then increased to a high pitch, and you copy this to Gold Wave's clipboard to try to remove it, the noise reduction would see that there are low and high frequencies present in the sound you want to remove, but it would not know when to remove which ones. Thus, any frequency that ever existed in the sound you are trying to remove will be swallowed up, which of course is going to sound terrible. Or, if the sound starts off quiet and gets louder, the noise reduction will tend to gravitate to the loudest parts. It will not know to be gentler during quieter bits.

To have a fair chance of removing sounds that change over time, you need something designed for this purpose, something to carve out the correct frequencies at the correct times and at the correct volumes. Fortunately, a few things which do this exist. The two options I know of and have tried are the kn0ck0ut vst which I will just call knockout, and Izotope RX now has a de-bleed module which can do this too. The former is free, the latter is not.

Knockout basically has two modes: extract the center (useful for vocal extraction), and extract one channel (you put the full mix on one channel and the sounds you want to remove on another, but I can't remember which channel should be which). Of course, the two should be as similar as possible, so they should be in sync, and the same volume. Unlike inversion though, the sounds don't have to be exactly identical for removal to be effective. They just need to be as close as you can get them.

Unfortunately the output of Knockout is mono since it only has two inputs, one for your full mix and one for sounds to remove. I would've preferred the sounds to remove be on the sidechain, then you could process in stereo. Most modern VSTs that take two types of input use the sidechain, but Knockout is old and I don't think it's being developed any longer. With some routing though, you could set two instances to work by sidechaining. I haven't tried this yet, but I presume it would work. The only real issue with Knockout is that it does produce artifacts especially if the sound you're trying to remove is loud. Perhaps newer things will come out in the future that can remove sounds more affectively and with less artifacts.

The de-bleed option in Izotope RX has less artifacts most of the time, though it isn't as aggressive as Knockout. De-bleed isn't a VST however. it's a module in the RX standalone application, which is actually pretty good for accessibility. And there's a fully functional demo, so you can try it if you want.

Few, that's it I think. I hope you've found something helpful in this rambling! Lol

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2019-02-13 17:23:52

Thx for that, this is interesting I gotta admit.