Removing Echos from Audio Using Audacity

Recently I’ve been making doing some podcasting with my daughter and trying a variety of recording setups. The other day we recorded in the same room using separate Yeti USB microphones.

That worked great, except when I went to edit the podcast, there was a slight echo from where her mic was picking up me talking, and vice versa.

I ended up importing the separate WAV files into Audacity, syncing them as close as possible, and then looking for methods online to remove the last bit of echo.

Many tutorials recommended using the Noise Reduction plugin that comes with Audacity or the Noisegate plugin that is freely available. Neither of those did much to remove the echo.

However, a couple of comments on this article finally pointed me to a solution that worked for me:

  1. Select the entire audio track and then open the Graphic EQ plugin.
  2. Set the sliders from 25 through 100 HZ to -20db (the lowest possible setting)
  3. Set the 125 HZ slider to -10 db
  4. Set the 200 HZ slider to -10 db
  5. Leave all other sliders at their default of 0 db

That removed 95 percent of the echo I was hearing. There was still a little, but it was much better and good enough to use on the final video.

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