This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3751 from Monday the 19th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Using Noise Torch.
It is hosted by Delta Ray and is about 7 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
This summary is, Noise Torch, is a program for Linux that creates a virtual microphone that
removes background sounds.
Hello, I'm Delta Ray.
I wanted to talk about this new application that I found that apparently has been around
for a few years, but I found it after searching for information on how to make a podcast.
You might notice that I have some noise in the background.
One is a fan that is just running like a cooling fan that just blows breeze on me or
whatever.
The other noise is, well, actually music, it's not noise, but it's background sound that
I don't want necessarily get into a podcast and that's my daughter playing piano
in the background.
So it can be difficult to find time to actually do a podcast if you have to live in a house
with other people and they're doing their own thing or whatever and you have maybe a noisy
computer and stuff.
There's this great program called Noise Torch.
I'll post a link to it in the show notes, but what it does is it apparently uses a neuron
network to suppress noise and background noises other than like your own talking.
It's pretty easy to use and it's written specifically for Linux and let me just give you
a demo really quick.
So right now I'm talking into my HyperX Quadcast S microphone and I've set Noise Torch to
be a virtual microphone and I can actually switch over to it right now and you should
notice that a lot of the background noise is now dropped out, like I'll stop talking
for a second there and you probably don't even hear anything in the background.
And now I'll switch back to the normal microphone, you can hear how much of a difference
that makes and I'll switch back to the noise suppression.
So the microphone still running, my daughter is still playing piano, excuse me, I wonder
if you heard me cough and it cuts out all of that.
So I can feel comfortable making like a podcast using this program without worrying about
other background noises getting into the mix.
You may live in a city or an noisy neighborhood or something like that, maybe live next
to an airport and you're always having planes taking off or something like that.
This can enable you to make it easier for you to do podcasts.
So the way it works is you download this binary from GitHub they have releases and then
you run the program and it asks you what microphone you actually want to hook up.
So it will show you the microphones that you have like I have a webcam microphone, I have
this hyper S microphone, hyper X microphone and so I can choose one of those and I can just
set a voice activation threshold right now I have my set to 36% okay to that in a second.
And then I just say load noise torch and what happens is I see a new microphone show up
in my sound settings that is called noise torch microphone for hyper X quadcasts analog
stereo and so I can choose that microphone and then that's when it switches over and starts
doing the noise suppression.
So it's pretty easy to use.
There were quite a little bit of tweaking I mean what you can do is just set your voice
activation threshold to like 80% and record a little bit and then load it into audacity
or something and kind of see the waveform to see where it's cutting out the noise well enough
so it suppresses it but also so that it doesn't cut off the beginning of your words.
The higher you set the activation threshold it will start to cut off the beginning of
your words when you start talking maybe it's doing that a little bit for me right now.
But if you go too low you'll start hearing the background noise start creeping into the
recording you might even get some clicking so you kind of have to play around with that
fortunately it makes it easy to you know reload noise torch whenever you change that.
Just keep in mind that when you do reload noise torch that it'll your Linux sound system
up settings like in your GUI are going to change back to your default microphone so you
have to remember to switch back to the noise torch microphone otherwise you're not getting
the benefit.
So this can be used in a pulse audio and pipe wire under Linux type wires a new sound system
for Linux.
I'm using pulse audio right now but I've been thinking about trying a pipe wire
soon there's a really great YouTube video of a guy also demoing noise torch and he
runs a hair dryer right you know pretty close to the microphone he runs a hair dryer
while he's talking and you can't hear the hair dryer pretty amazing and like I said you
know my daughter's been playing a piano in the background and it's fairly loud for me
down here in my basement office and otherwise it would kind of prevent me from doing a podcast
at this time.
So yeah for me 36 you know 27% 36% to 40% works pretty well as a level to set to.
One thing you might notice when you look up noise torch is that there was a security incident
a few years ago where the guy who maintained noise torch had his computer was compromised
and so as a precaution he actually shut down noise torch as a project because he felt
like it was the responsible thing to do which I think is really great you know incident
response you know care about your your users and stuff and he did unfortunately he
didn't really come back to it or he helped out the new project or something so some
of the community members took the code and they vetted the code they went through and
didn't analysis to look for malicious code and they couldn't find anything so it's
suspected that you know the code is no more dangerous than any other code that you
download for your computer at this moment you know it's all code potentially has some
compromise in it but they couldn't find anything so it looks like it's going to be okay
generally so yeah check out noise torch and see how it works out for you and hopefully
that will enable you to make more podcasts and contribute to HPR more thank you have a good
day.
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