Audacity’s noise reduction tool

SoundForge XP 4.5 is my main editing tool for most things audio (yes, it’s a really old copy, but it’s what I have on my laptop and it works), but today I needed to do a little noise reduction filtering that my version of SoundForge couldn’t handle. For some reason I had a nasty hum in the background of the the interview I recorded for next week’s Radio program. I knew Audacity (did I mention it is free?) had a noise reduction filter, but the one time I tried to use it before there wasn’t enough singled-out “noise” for the application to sample. This time I had plenty. The results were excellent. I didn’t notice much of a difference in the voice tone after the filtering, but the nasty hum is definitely gone. So if you need to do some simple noise filtering (like tape hiss) and don’t want to pay for the expensive plug-ins or packages, give Audacity a fly.