Remove noise with Audacity and FFmpeg – YouTube

Remove noise with Audacity and FFmpeg - YouTube

This week YouTube is the continuation of my multimedia series on YouTube. This video is about noise canceling. I go through how to remove background noise with Audacity and FFmpeg.


In earlier videos, I talked about screencasting and recording podcasts with FFmpeg. This time, I take it to the next level of publishing more professional videos.


The thing is I’m recording these videos as I’m learning how to improve my video recording so it’s a kind of win-win situation. I learn something, publish a video about it on YouTube and people also get benefited from if they go through the same path 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op1kEktlivE

TLDW; the idea is to get rid of the background noise using Audacity first and then bind the clean audio with the original video using FFmpeg.

For that first you need to import the video to Audacity, no worries it takes care of converting it to audio. Then select an area in the audio wave that has pure noise.

After that, you need to get the noise profile. Go to Effect -> Noise Reduction and select Get Noise Profile. Once it’s done, select the entire audio wave (pressing Ctrl + A) and then again go to Effect -> Noise Reduction but this time click on the OK button.

Lastly, export the audio as an MP3 file.

Now that you have done with cleaning the audio, it’s time to bind it to the original video with FFmpeg.

Don’t panic is a one-liner command,

$ ffmpeg -i original_video.mkv -i clean_audio.mp3 -c:v copy -c:a flac -map 0:v:0 -map 1:a:0 out.mkv

And that’s how you remove background noise with Audacity and FFmpeg.

For more YouTube videos don’t forget to check out my channel or YouTube category of the site at the links down below:

Inline/featured images credits