AI Noise Reduction: Friend or Foe? Exploring Descript’s Studio Sound

You are any her. Three Welcome the pro Audio Suite. Thanks you guys, a professional and motivator. Thanks to try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian Audio Making Passion Hurd Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging side to the video stars, George the Tech Whittam from La and Me, Andrew Peters Voice Sober Talent and Home Studio Guy Out and welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to Austrian Audio Making Passion Heard and try Booth. Don't forget the code t ri PAP two hundred to get your try booth and three reasons why you should get a try Booth. One you can stand up the work. Two it comes from a bundle of goodies from George. And three it fits in a suitcase much like my little friend. That's another story. George comes in the suitcase. Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's my little venture quis He quite enjoys the hand. But anyway, we're talking about today because Georgie stumbled across a TV show or YouTube show streaming streaming show. Yeah, it was just a YouTube. It's a YouTube channel. It's not a big channel either. It's I was saying, it's big enough that it got served to me as a suggested video, right, I didn't seek it out, So it's not too tiny. This video has fifty five thousand views. It's from a month ago, and it's a couple of folks walking around in architects home that is really incredible, you know, just a sort of force of interesting design. And it's very spartan. It's got a lot of concrete. The audio would clearly be reverberant, not awesome, right, it would be pretty funny. So whoever did the post on this video, in my opinion, clearly used some AI type tools to clean up the audio. Right. Let's face it, anybody doing YouTube videos of real estate tours unless it's a really big budget you know, production, and some of them are now actually real estate can be quite you know. Especially production. Yeah, and so, but this is just a tour of a guy's house, and so they clearly didn't have a lot of resources and they just use what had available to them. They might they must have found in descript the studio sound switch. It's just a switch you turn on. Now, if you don't know any better, you just turn it on and go, Well, that sounds really good, right, and you can leave it go. I as an engineer, there's a slider and I can slide that thing to the left and I can detune it and it changes it dramatically when you do that. And other tools are coming along now with similar sort of all or nothing settings. Right podcast out Adobe dot Com has had one for a while now, maybe a year or more. That's been a. Bit of a parlor trick. Actually, the way it fixes audio, this definitely falls into that same category. So I'll play a little bit of this videos clip audio and keep in mind concrete house, concrete glass, two people, no boom mic, just two lab mics. It should sound pretty reverberant and lively. This is what it sounds like. We brought these in for a photo shoot and I love them so much I just kept them. Amazing. They're made out of stainless steel. Wow, they're actually really comfortable, but they don't look like they are. But I like sitting in the should Okay, comfortable might be a bit of a streamer, not for a whole movie, but it's kind of fast. No, I love these ones are gorgeous. Yeah, these are vintage from Amsterdam. You get the point. Yeah. And then of course the gobbled version of English that all of a sudden tips into scan ivy in for a second. Yeah, Well that makes me wonder whether that's two things. Is that de reverb working too hard and just cutting things off in a way that makes it sound funny? No, I will I will tell you unequivocally that I've had that experience with the script. Okay, I have been listening to my audio with studio sound on, and I've been like, what the heck just happened? What happened to my voice right there? That is crazy? And then I go in and I detune it, you know, go from one hundred percent to like ninety percent, and it's like a totally different algorithm. Right, So when it's at one hundred, it's literally replace your voice with an AI version of you. That's what it's doing, right. Very unnatural, very weird. Extremely the word I can think of here is extremely sterile to a bizarre point. There's no room tone, there's nothing, It's just voices in your head, you know what I mean. It's like the II. It doesn't recognize a wood or a sentence and just make something up. Yeah, it gets absolutely confused. And descripts Studio sound thing. Will do that. Once in a blue moon, it does do it. I don't know why. I don't know how to say. I don't know how to disable it other than again, with descript, I can detune it from ninety nine. If I go from one hundred percent to ninety nine percent, it's a different algorithm. It sounds totally different, and then you can sort of fine tune it. Right. But guys, I guess what I'm saying is if you're relying on these AI tools as a easy click, move along kind of solution, they aren't because they are not predictable. They're just not predictable. Clearly, as you heard, they hallucinate. Even with human voice. It's just all the same thing. Whether it's video, a graphic, an audio file is uncanny until it's not, and then all of a sudden, it's just like, oh, that's fake, that's so weird. Yeah. Yeah, and it's happening with audio now too. So I don't know what to say beyond that, I don't know what you guys think and what your what tools you have you run into anything akin to this at all in your experience. Well, just I'm just thinking of the early days of deep breath. Mmmm, when the first first de breath came out, which I think like. Waves deep breath you're talking about. Yeah, it could have made It's really early in the pace. Yeah, it would like make people, it would like depluralize words. Yeah. Yeah, it's a funny thing. Yeah. I mean, so you know, you just ran it, and if you didn't do playback and you send this thing off, I feel sorry for the bunny at the other end. It's kind of funny. That's one of the reasons why I never really cared that much about faster than real time bounce, because ultimately, if you don't listen to what you send out, it is your fault. And faster than real time bounce is great for like you know, here you go auditions, approval stuff, But the last one that goes out. You ever mixed a TV program, Robert and done a non real time bounce? Never, neither of I and I can't see that I ever would, as you say, I might do it as a director's mix sort of for them to listen to. But I would never do a final mix of anything like that and just keep my fingers cross them. If you do, then you've got to play it anywhere. Well, yeah, you've got to listen to a bat, You've got to listen to a back at some stage. And let's be honest, it's really the only stage in the process where you actually get to sit back and just listen to it overall, because when you when you're mixing, you're listening to certain things and then then all sort of I don't know what your process is. But then towards the end, I'll just go through and I'll listen for a confidence mix, and you know, you'll always pick up a few little things. So that last time is when you're bouncing it out, is when you've actually gone, okay, I'm pretty happy with this. I'm just going to sit back and watch it as a listener now. And that's when you go, oh shit, well maybe I should change that, blah blah blah. Yeah, because when it's bouncing, it's. Hard to step away as a listener. When you're that close. When you're bouncing, you're not watching the tracks for all by. No, and you're not counting, you're not leasting for anything specifically, you're just doing it as. A and pro tools. There's sort of three options. You have bounced a disc, which is going to give you either a faster than real time option or a real time option. And the real time option you would hear it, but you would not see the video playback faster real time. You wouldn't hear it, except funny enough, if you had the old Source live plug in, then you would hear through the stream. Yeah, well, I captured alder separate tracks. I bounce my stems and everything else out at once, So internally, that's what it gives me. If it's a TV program, for example, I just hit record and I basically sit there and watch it as a viewer for forty minutes or whatever. Right, and you get your your separate stems and your mix, your stereo maybe and your surround mix all in one. Just even just like me, not being an engineer, but just recording my voice and doing a quick edit to send off or long, it depends on how long the file is. But I if I've got the luxury of the time, they'll do it, and then I'll disappear for an hour and then come back and play it back. To see how it sounds. Yep, because it's funny when you clean it, you know, refresh your refresh your head. Yeah, you have to eat some ginger? Is that right? To eat some ginger? You know, like they give you a what do you call it? Like you need you need an oral amos? I use that word again, Yeah, but yeah those So how many times have you guys been mid bounce and going ah, crap. Well see that's the beauty of doing bouncing it down to it or sort of recording it down to another track, is you can just stop, fix whatever it is, scroll back five seconds, and just punch in and keep going. Jump in right. Actually, if you're on especially if you're on the like the clocked pro tool systems, but even now pretty much any one of them. Imagine you're doing like a like a two hour movie. And I've done a few documentaries, but usually I'm thirty seconds. But for a really long movie, I start bouncing right away, and then I always use the same file. And then pro tools has a feature called destructive where you can punch into one section and just plow right into that wave file, and that way you don't have to like suffer through the whole thing to make a new file. And you also you're not eating up so much hard drive space every time you make a new file, because if you just like, oh fast in real time fast and real time, you're just like two hour file. That's cool. I heard of that mode. I just can't treat it like tape. Yeah, yeah, that's that's an interesting way. I just I just do the consolidate at the end. I just highlight them all and consolidate and do it that way. But everyone's got their own way. Yeah, you can do that too well. I guess you have to make sure that the punch is good. I always I always roll. Yeah, yeah, a couple of seconds. I guess I'm moral of stories. Listen to absolutely everything you send out. Never trust it computer. I mean even you know, not even a mac you know, I never trust it completely. It's just there's too. Many things that can go wrong there, really is. I have people hurriedly send in auditions with their MacBook mic because they just didn't notice that they looked down from the MacBook mice and back. Yeah. Even listen to your dubs. Here's here's a crazy, crazy story. This is like around ninety six, ninety seven, doing a radio spot and uh dubbing cassettes for the client. And in the radio spot is a guy watching TV. So I put on the sound of a TV, which in America is like fifteen K, right, like that high frequency like that you hear with an old, old school TV. So I put that in the mix. Everything's fine, I make the dubs on the cassette. I just give them the cassettes and they come back and they're like, the cassettes sound all like all weird. And it turns out that that fifteen K sound that I put in there that no one could hear anyways, probably totally messed with the bias of the cassette. When the doves remade, oh wow, just like yeah, yeah, that was weird, but they didn't listen to them. I just, you know, hit recording. I remember we had we built studios at George Pat's and the guy who did all the wiring was a guy called Terry Fogg and he still does my wiring actually, And he built these sort of switch panels and on one side was what you were recording, but on the other side was like a confidence monitor. So if you were doing a mix and you were striping to sp as well as a time code of DAT and whatever else you made recording to. You could actually and they had them all listed and you would just click on the button that you wanted to listen to and you could just check as you were going. You could listen back to it while it was being striped, so you could I just want to check at the sp audio yep, that's okay, yep. And you could just flick through each one and it was so convenient just to be able to do that. I mean, you can do it with routing now in pro tools, but in those days that was like, man, this is so cool. You know, I can listen back to what I need to and make sure it's it's sounding good. So listen back. I did actually send off an ad. I had about five of them to do, and I edit always deep breath edit, make sure they're you know, running to thirty or twenty eight, depending on what they are. So I did. I thought I'd done them all until for some reason I was just I looked at one of the wave files after I'd sent and I thought, that doesn't look like it's been edited. And it was appalling because I just pick up as i'd go and say oh fuck that, and I you know, so all that shit went. Oh wow, whoops? Yeah yeah? Care for yeah yeah yeah yeah. Open mic it's the same. It's the same thing as a radio station, isn't it. Make sure that fucking MIC's off before you say anything you don't want anyone else to hear. And we've all done that. Is ever. The pro Audio Suite and Austrian Audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. We have to take support from George the techwom don't forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say today, drop us a note at our website dot com.