How to edit out keyboard sound in GarageBand?

December 7, 2010 7:44 AM

I have a mov file that I imported into GarageBand. It has male and female voices, and the sound of someone typing on a keyboard. How would I edit this keyboard sound out? FYI I know next to nothing about GarageBand, so keep it simple please.
posted by shivohum to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: Some of it's separated, but there's a good bit of overlay as well.
posted by shivohum at 7:55 AM on December 7, 2010

If there's overlay, there's almost no chance you can do this without also losing sound that you don't want to lose.
posted by proj at 8:08 AM on December 7, 2010

I have tried and failed to do exactly this.

There is virtually no way for you to remove the typing sound: it's random, not consistent, so noise reduction applications can't get a hold of it, and typewriter typing is pretty full-spectrum sound, so you can't just filter it out without taking huge chunks of the vocal information with it.

I say virtually because there is a slight chance that one of the highest-end audio restoration suites (CEDAR, etc.) might be able to help, but that's thousands of dollars of software or hundreds of dollars of high-end audio restoration studio time.
posted by Aquaman at 8:29 AM on December 7, 2010

When I've had 'poppy' sound -- recordings from a scratched record -- I opened the audio in Audacity, highlighted the "peaks" (the click of the typewriter should be somewhat obvious), and deleted the sound altogether. It will result in a small 'jump', but if the click of the typewriter is so short it might not have as much of an effect on the sound as trying some post-processing software.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:16 AM on December 7, 2010