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Usage

Manual plugin workflow:

1. First select a portion of noise in your track of at least 1 second and loop it.
2. Turn on learn noise profile for a bit (at least 4 or 5 loops).
3. Once that's done turn it off and tweak parameters as you like.

Adaptive plugin workflow:

1. Play the signal.
2. Tweak parameters.

Parameters explained

• Amount of reduction: Determines how much the noise floor will be reduced.
• Reduction Strength: Scales the noise profile learned. Greater values will reduce more noise at the expense of removing low level detail of the signal. This parameter takes into consideration a psycho-acoustic model that gets the masking thresholds of an estimated clean signal and adaptively scales the noise spectrum in order to avoid distortion or musical noise. Set it to 0 to turn it off.
• Smoothing: Amount of smoothing to apply from frame to frame. Larger values will reduce artifacts but might blur transients. Set it to 0 to turn it off.
• Transient Protection: This switch enables transient protection when smoothing. Use it when you are treating a signal that has transients and smoothing is blurring the transients too much.
• Whitening: Modifies the residual noise to be more like white noise. This takes into account that our ears do well discriminating sounds in white noise versus colored noise. Higher values will brighten the residual noise and will mask high frequency artifacts.
• Learn noise profile: Enables the noise capture. Loop a section of the signal that has the noise you want to eliminate and enable it. Once a few second pass disable it and you'll start to hear the reduction.
• Reset noise profile: Removes the noise profile previously learned.
• Residual listen: To only hear the residue of the reduction. This will be just the noise you are reducing and maybe some signal if you are going too far with the other parameters

Advice for better reduction

General noise reduction advice

• Try to reduce and not remove entirely the noise. It will sound better.
• Gentler settings with multiple instance of the plug-in will probably sound better than too much reduction with one instance. Of course for every instance the noise should be re-learned again.
• If the noise varies to much from one section to other apply different reduction for each part.
• Always remember to listen to the residual signal to make sure that you are not distorting the signal too much.
• Start with the reduction at 0 dB and then decrease it until you hear artifacts then tune the parameters to get rid of them without distorting the signal.
• It might help using an spectrogram analysis to help you notice what you are doing.

For the adaptive plugin:

• Adaptive mode should be used only with voice tracks because the algorithm for noise estimation is tuned for that use.
• It's recommended to play with the reduction strength because those are estimated continuously and the algorithm used for that tends sometimes to overestimate them.
• If the track you are processing does not have a long section of noise before the wanted signal starts cut some noise from an in-between section and extend the beginning a bit. This is to take into account the time that takes the algorithm to learn the noise.

For the manual plugin:

• If noise floor changes a bit over time it might be useful to use higher reduction strength.
• Make sure that the section you select to learn the noise profile is noise only (no breaths or sustained notes or anything but noise)
• The longer the section you select to learn the noise the better the reduction will sound.
• The best way to reduce artifacts is to use a combination of reduction strength, smoothing and if needed transient protection. Increasing the reduction strength will reduce musical noise and at the same time it will preserve the wanted signal but too much will start to distort it. Smoothing can also reduce musical noise significantly but too much can blur transients away. To avoid this you can use the transient protection option to avoid blurring them too much. If you are not perceiving what you are doing, listen to the residual signal and increase to a higher value. Each of this controls work independently be sure to try the smallest amount of each one just to avoid artifacts. This will lead to a better reduction.