How To Stop Your Mic From Picking Up Background Noise

An audio headset with a built-in microphone, which can reduce background noise. — Micolas/Shutterstock.com

Whether y'all're video conferencing with colleagues, chatting with friends, or recording content for public consumption, audio recording quality is ever important. Here'southward how to get a well-baked, clear, audio recording and minimize background racket on a Windows PC.

Basic Tips for Clear Audio Recording

Before yous dig into software features, you should follow some basic best practices for clearer audio recording. Hither are a few quick tips:

Wear Headphones: If your microphone is picking upwardly noise from your speakers, put on headphones to eliminate the echo.
Use a Defended Microphone or Headset: Many laptops have pretty low-quality congenital-in microphones. Sure, they piece of work, but that'southward about all that can be said for them. Endeavour plugging a dedicated microphone or headset into your PC.
Eliminate or Movement Away From Background Noise: Close windows, motility away from air vents, go to less noisy rooms, close applications that are causing your laptop's fans to whirr, move your microphone farther abroad from your mouth and then other people tin can't hear your breathing, and generally think near how you can avoid noises. Consider trading out that noisy mechanical keyboard for something quieter while on calls. Consider muting yourself on the telephone call while you lot're not speaking, likewise.

How to Enable Noise Reduction in Windows

Similar Windows 7 before information technology, Windows 10 offers some integrated microphone options that will help with microphone background noise. The exact options available will depend on the sound hardware in your PC and your manufacturer's audio drivers.

These options are establish in the traditional Command Panel. They aren't available in the new Settings app. To observe them, open the Control Panel from the Starting time carte and head to Hardware and Audio > Sound.

Opening Sound options in Windows 10's Control Panel

Click the "Recording" tab in the Audio window, select your microphone device, and click "Properties."

Launching a microphone device's properties window

Click the "Levels" tab. If yous're dealing with background noise, try lowering the Microphone Boost option—perhaps to +10.0 dB instead of +twenty.dB. This makes the microphone more than sensitive, which means information technology volition have an easier time hearing you lot, but it will also pick up more background noises.

Afterwards reducing the microphone boost option, endeavour setting microphone volume all the way to 100. If y'all lower the boost setting and the microphone is quieter, increasing the volume hither will make it easier for people to hear you lot.

After changing some settings, click "Apply" and exam your microphone again to encounter if it helped things.

Microphone volume level and boost options that affect background noise

Finally, click over to the "Enhancements" tab. This tab may not be available—it depends on your PC'south audio hardware and drivers.

If there'due south a "Noise Suppression" or "Noise Cancellation" option, enable it. Other options here may too assistance reduce background noise—for case, on the PC nosotros tested this on, there was an "Acoustic Echo Cancellation" option that would help reduce repeat caused by speakers if you're not wearing headphones.

Click "OK" to salvage your changes and close the window.

Enabling Noise Suppression on Windows 10

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Apply Noise-Cancelling Software or Features

Pop communications tools are gaining increasingly sophisticated noise-canceling features that work on calls. Some software programs promise to remove background noise while recording any application on your PC. Here are some tools you can utilise:

Google Come across: Google added dissonance counterfoil to Google Come across on April 22, 2020. Google See will automatically filter out background noise.
Zoom: Zoom has built-in groundwork noise suppression that's enabled by default. To check these options, open Zoom'south settings window from its menu, select "Audio" in the sidebar, and click the "Advanced" push. Y'all'll encounter the "Suppress Persistent Background Noise," "Suppress Intermittent Groundwork Dissonance," and "Echo cancellation" features. These audio-processing features are all set to "Auto" by default, but you can disable them or tune them to be more or less ambitious.

Zoom's background noise options in its Settings window.

NVIDIA RTX Voice: With the NVIDIA RTX Vox application installed, you can activate a "Remove Groundwork Racket" feature that uses machine learning and the power of an NVIDIA GPU to remove background noise from your microphone in whatsoever application on your arrangement. Co-ordinate to NVIDIA, this software only works on systems with NVIDIA RTX GPUs. Still, Ars Technica reports that it can work on PCs with older NVIDIA graphics hardware also.
Discord: Discord now has a built-in noise suppression feature powers by Krisp.ai. To enable information technology while voice chatting, click the Dissonance Suppression button at the bottom left of Discord'due south sidebar and activate "Racket Suppression."

Noise Suppression in Discord

Krisp.ai, available in Discord for free, also offers a software product that tin enable racket counterfoil in any application—similar NVIDIA'due south RTX Vox software, but for PCs without whatever. It has a free tier that offers 120 minutes of noise cancellation for free every week, but you'll take to pay $3.33 per month after that.

Many other video-conferencing applications have built-in noise cancellation features, also. You lot may exist able to configure them from the application's settings window. If you're using an ancient video-conferencing tool that doesn't have born noise counterfoil, your organisation may be ameliorate off switching to a modern solution that does.

Consider a Dissonance-Canceling Microphone

If zip else works well, you may need a better microphone. Some microphones are designed to filter out or reduce ambient noise. For instance, they may have 2 microphones built in—a principal mic to tape your voice and a secondary mic to record ambient noise. They tin can so filter out the ambient dissonance. They're often marketed as "dissonance-canceling microphones."

Even if you don't option up a microphone designed specifically for that, a amend-quality microphone may be a big improvement in sound quality over a congenital-in laptop microphone or an old headset you had lying around.

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