In MobileViews mini-podcast 33, I threw MobileViews Podcast 440 into Adobe Podcast beta to learn more about the currently free service’s noise reduction and speech enhancement. The result was underwhelming. However, I conceded this may be because (a) the audio was already processed by Microsoft Team’s noise reduction feature and (b) an already reasonable quality audio is not the best test case for the service.
So, I walked outside and recorded a minute of myself speaking with a good breeze blowing, many birds chirping, and an aircraft flying in the distance. After a brief preamble by me, you can hear the audio recorded outdoors without any post-processing followed by the same minute of audio processed by Adobe Podcast beta. The difference is striking. You can see in the screenshot here a few seconds of both tracks before and after Adobe Podcast processing. In the screenshot example, you can see where a bird chirp is nearly completely removed by Adobe Podcast.
My current thinking, though, is that if I start recording podcasts outdoors, I want to keep most of the ambient sound except for the wind over the microphone. A mic wind sheild should handle that without needing additional post-processing. More tests to come…
Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.