Clean up a field recording

Steps

1. Click New Project and drag your recording onto the viewport. If the viewport shows Edit as a clip, press it so the whole file loads. The waveform fills the view.

2. With the graph stopped, press Listen to hear it, or right-click the waveform and choose Listen from here.

3. Find a second or two with nothing but the noise, before the first sound or between two sounds. Drag across it to draw a range.

4. Choose Clean > Denoise. The range becomes its noise sample, and that noise is turned down across the whole recording. On its card, set Reduction db to about 12. Go higher until it starts to sound watery, then back off.

   

5. Click outside the range to clear it. Choose Tone > High pass to take out rumble and handling noise, and set Cutoff hz to 80 in the Properties panel.

   

6. Drag a range from the first clean moment after the bumps at the start to the very end, and choose Edit > Trim > Trim to range.

7. Choose Level > Gain and fades > Fade out. With no range drawn, it fades the last second.

8. Open Window > Panels > Stack. Click any edit and press Compare to hear the sound before and after it.

9. Choose Send to > Save to a sound file... and give it a name. The file is written when you press Play on the transport bar, and again whenever the sound changes.