How to get rid of pesky sibilants without a de-esser [podfic tips]

[kdheart]

Quick post, bc it's come up and it's something that took me a few weeks to figure out: How to manage sibilants without a de-esser plug-in in Audacity.

The short answer: use Plot Spectrum to find the loudest frequency and then tone it down using Notch Filter. Set Q to around 5-7 for best results.
Slightly longer answer with pictures:

Select the portion of audio that you want to de-ess. Go to Analyze and click on Plot Spectrum (I suggest adding a shortcut for this function if you need it often - which is how I managed to completely forget what it was called or where exactly in the menu to find it before I made these screencaps)

It will give you something like this, except the peaks should stand out more

Hover your mouse over it and it will show you the peak frequency


then use that in Notch Filter (love of my editing life!)

If you use 9 for Qq, it will cut out that frequency drastically. Use 5-7 to tone it down, 2-4 if you need to tone down the adjacent frequency bands.
It also works on lower frequencies, if you have a weird rumble that you can't remove with noise reduction or it's higher than 100Hz and a high pass filter would affect your sound quality too much

Comments

[growlery]

this is amazing?????? thank you so much for posting this!