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Richard Toth

Richard Toth

Audio engineer / Audio restoration specialist https://audio-cleaning-online.com

Automatic (AI) VS. Professional (Manual) audio cleanup — Samples included

2 min readMar 19, 2021
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Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko — Pexels

It’s interesting to note that more and more online services are offering automatic audio restoration as an add-on to their paid video editing services. It’s advertised as free, but in the end, it always turns out that there are additional costs involved.

We tested one of them, and in this brief content, we’ll present the test results. It wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t compare our work to theirs, so let’s listen to the three samples.

Which one do you think sounds best and most pleasant to the human ear?

Is the automatic one or the one produced by our online audio cleanup service?

Please, grab your headphones for the optimal experience:

Original recording — With a lot of background noise, the voice is weak as well.
After automatic noise removal — There’s a huge left-over noise, the voice is louder but still weak.
After a professional audio expert fixed it — No noise at all, and the voice sounds professional.

After listening, it’s clear that the automatic solution couldn’t handle the task. There is still a lot of leftover noise, and the voice is still weak, albeit slightly louder.

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After professional audio cleanup, the result is clean, with the noise gone and the voice sounding natural and full, with great low-end.

As you probably want to get it after background noise removal.

Ultimately, if you don’t need professional-sounding audio material, it might be worth using automatic services. However, for professional work, it’s best to hire a professional audio restoration specialist. There are many specialists available online, so it’s not difficult to find one.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.

Cheers,

Richard

Update 1.)

Just a quick note: We receive a lot of audio files every day that AI isn’t able to handle. If you have this type of work, please send us the original, unedited and unprocessed file(s) because using audio services based on Artificial Intelligence can potentially cause irreversible damage to the sound. This can also happen if people don’t fully understand what they are doing with the files. It’s not their fault; it’s due to the complex nature of sound restoration. Thank you!

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