How to Improve Audio Quality with Adobe Audition

If you are getting familiar with the use of Adobe Audiotion, this blog is for you! We will talk about How to Improve Audio Quality with Adobe Audition. Follow our step-by-step guide and take your audio quality to the next level.

Table of Contents

1. How to Improve Audio Quality with Adobe Audition
2. How to eliminate background noise?
3. How to Remove Silences?
4. How to Normalize and Amplify Volume?
5. Amberscript’s transcription services

How to Improve Audio Quality with Adobe Audition

Today we’re not going to touch upon the recording part, but we’ll focus on the simple editing techniques in Adobe Audition. And if you use free software like Audacity – you can still follow along, since the procedures are almost the same. However, if something doesn’t match, take a look at this article on How to Improve Audio Quality with Audacity.

We assume that your recording is of decent quality with no major problems. And in case you’re just about to record something, be sure to skim through our post on how to improve your audio quality .

You might be wondering why it is important to have the highest quality of audio possible. Let us give you a few benefits:

• Better comprehension: Clear audio helps the understanding of the video, it increases comprehension, thus it creates a better experience for your audience. On the contrary, when the audio quality is poor, it might lead to the viewers not watching your it at all.
• Reach a wider audience: High audio quality is especially beneficial, when people with different native languages are watching your video. Providing a high audio quality will ensure that people from different backgrounds also understand and interact with your video.
• Makes transcription easier: Transcribing your video has several benefits, such as increased accessibility and better SEO performance. Did you know that a high audio quality results in more accurate transcription? Amberscript’s machine-made service for instance, can create up to 85% accurate transcripts, when the quality of the audio is high.

Amberscript’s transcription services

You might wonder why it’s important to improve the quality of your audio. By having high quality audio/video files you will be able to transcribe your files with a high accuracy. Amberscript offers two kinds of transcription services.

• Machine-made Transcription

Machine-Made transcripts are beneficial as they can save up to 70% of your time compared to transcribing you audio by yourself. When a high quality audio is provided, Amberscript’s software can generate a transcript of up to 85% accuracy in more than 39 different languages. Due to the fast turnaround time, machine-made transcripts can scale up your businesses’ efficiency drastically.

• Human-Made Transcription

Amberscript also works together with a large group pf freelancers, who are native speakers experienced in transcribing. They correct your automatically generated transcripts and ensure that the quality is perfect. Although the process generally takes more time, you will receive transcripts of up to 100% accuracy.

Who is Amberscript?

How to eliminate background noise?

Now that you are aware of the importance of high audio quality, let us teach you how to increase it in Adobe Audition. This is perhaps the most important step of the entire workflow. Luckily, nothing could be easier. First, you need your “room tone” for that. A room tone is a ‘natural’ sound of your room or location. Don’t confuse it with complete silence though, the room tone is a mixture of low-volume sounds, that take place within your environment and make up the background noise.

You might not necessarily hear all of these sounds, but your microphone does pick them up. Examples include noise coming from computer fans, air conditioning, or power sockets.

In order to improve audio quality, all you have to do is to record 5-10 seconds of silence – that will be your basis for noise elimination. If you forgot to do so deliberately – don’t worry, you probably have pauses where you don’t talk, we can also use those smaller samples.

Please note, that the position of the microphone in relation to your room plays a role, so if you record something in a different spot – you’ll likely have a different room tone.

Now, that the theory is covered, let’s get to practice.

1. Select the audio fragment
2. Go to Effects → Noise Reduction/ Restoration → Noise – Reduction (process)
3. Press “capture noise print”
4. Then select “entire file”
5. Usually, the default settings produce nice results but feel free to play with the sliders.
6. Apply

How to Remove Silences?

No matter what it is, an interview for your thesis, a podcast or a speech – every recording will have small or larger gaps of silence. You can easily find silent fragments of your audio by looking at the waveform (highlighted on the screenshot)- it is flat and static.

Depending on the length of your audio, you can either cut these parts manually or automate the software to do it for you. In both cases make sure not to delete the silence completely, but to shorten it. Otherwise, your audio will sound unnatural and rushed.

Manually:

1. Look for silent fragments
2. Right-click, then crop

Automatically: 

1. Go to Effects → Diagnostics → Delete Silence (process)
2. Inside the Diagnostics tab go to Settings, then press “Find levels”
3. Press fix by “shortening silence”
4. The default setting is shortening silence by 100ms, and in most cases, it works well.
5. Click the “Scan” button, click on Settings again, you’ll see a list of problems, just press “Delete all”

How to Normalize and Amplify Volume?

These terms might sound difficult, but they stand for very simple processes. In essence, normalizing is a relative volume adjustment, while amplifying is absolute: they are both a way to improve quality audio.

Normalizing audio means setting a peak or target volume for a certain part of the audio file, meaning that quiet areas will be raised to a certain volume, while the loud ones will be brought down or remain untouched.

For instance, if you’ve recorded an interview, normalizing your audio can bring all the voices to a certain level of volume, making sure that neither of them is too quiet nor too loud.

1. Select the fragment you want to alter
2. Go to Effects → Amplitude and Compression → Normalizing audio (process)
3. Select a % or dB value and click Apply
4. Make sure “Normalize all changes equally” box is checked

Amplifying means increasing/ decreasing the volume of the audio fragment by a certain amount. What it means is both quiet and loud values will be affected in the same way.

You can use this feature if the entire part of the recording is too quiet or too loud.

1. Select the fragment you want to alter
2. Go to Effects → Amplitude and Compression → Amplify
3. Select a preset and choose “Apply”

And…. that’s it! Your audio should be nice and clean now thanks to our post on how to improve audio quality! The next step is transcribing your recording into text. Fortunately, with Amberscript it can be done automatically and in a few minutes. Check out our products.