Indie Maker Update: Audio Processing Improvements

Second Indie Maker Update of the Day

Aren't you lucky? Today, I spent about four hours fine-tuning my FFMPEG pipeline. Here's a rundown of what I worked on:

Enhancing Audio Quality

I experimented with a recurrent neural network to denoise the track. Additionally, I aimed to improve the audio quality by disabling certain audio helpers in the getUserMedia request. These helpers, such as echo suppression, noise suppression, and level normalization, are often applied by iOS or Android browsers. While they help in some cases, they can degrade the audio to something akin to telephone quality. By turning these off, I managed to elevate the quality to something closer to native recorder medium settings.

Pipeline Adjustments

I made several tweaks to the pipeline that converts audio to MP3:

EQ Modifications: I applied a few equalizer adjustments to enhance the sound.
Level Normalization and Denoising: I normalized the audio levels and applied denoising techniques.
Band-Pass Filter: Implemented a simple band-pass filter to eliminate electrical hum.
Click Removal: Used plugins to remove clicks from the audio.
Silence Removal: Added a plugin to eliminate dead noise zones during periods of silence.

Results and Next Steps

Overall, I believe I've significantly improved the audio quality compared to a few hours ago. I'm quite pleased with the results and look forward to testing how it performs on other devices tomorrow.

Indie.am Update: Improving Audio Quality