Goyo -AI Noise Reduction Plugin

AI Noise Reduction Plugin for Musicians and Video Editors

Goyo -AI Noise Reduction Plugin for Musicians and Video Editors

https://www.youtube.com/@inthemix

Transcript:

If you're a musician or video editor, I've got a free tool that I think could be really useful for you. I was recently watching some ADC seminars about AI tools in the audio industry, and a free plugin really caught my attention. It's called GOYO and it's a free voice, denoise and de-reverb plugin, basically to try and make any bad recording sound better.

I've used many of the sort of more premium and expensive dialogue, restoration and denoising softwares, and those are very good, but I haven't come across a free tool that even comes close to what is offered by those. So I was really curious, downloaded it, tried it in my DAW and video editor, and was just completely shocked by the results.

I downloaded this just like anyone else can, there's no sponsorship or anything like that. The people that make this don't know me. I just thought it'd be a really cool tool or plugin to share with all of you. So let's take a look and a listen to it.

You can use it inside any DAW just as a plugin loaded on the mixer, as I've got here, or you can use it inside a video editor. I thought using it in a video editor would be more exciting for these examples, so that's what I'm going to do. But I know many people will just work in a DAW on vocal samples or whatever you've got. The plugin itself is very simple to use.

There's three dials, one for the ambience, so all the noise, one for the voice, and another for the voice reverb. Let's just take a listen. I'm recording in a completely untreated room. There's a bit of echo and reverberation, but there's also a fan and an air filter running at max speed, just to try and create some more noise here.

Let's see what we can do to make this sound better, hopefully a little bit more clean and clear. So this is without any denoising, and this is with the denoising. So initially the results, so to speak for themselves, of course, if we push this down too much, it's going to sound unnatural. Sort of depends what your audio is intended for. If it was for a YouTube video to be watched on our phone, then you could probably push it all the way like this. I'm recording in a completely untreated room. There's a bit of echo and reverberation.

But if it was for a more professional setting, like, you know, treating vocals for a song, or you're expecting people to use headphones or studio monitors, then I'd definitely keep it at a more light reduction, just like this. I'm recording in a completely untreated room. There's a bit of echo and reverberation.

It just takes it from something that's pretty unusable and quite annoying to listen to, to something where my voice is really nice and clean and clear. You can also solo in some of the bands to listen to, say, just the noise, (...) and to see what it's trying to pick up as noise in that signal. And you can also push the reverb and ambience more.

But the plugin's pretty self-explanatory, so I'm just going to go on to another example. This time I'll make this full screen and I'll just adjust the plugin as we're listening, because I think you get the idea. I had planned on trying to find a busy street or road to test this on, but this will have to do. So we've got a lot of sound from the river here.

There's some birds. There's a little bit of wind. So all of that's just competing with my voice. Now, of course, if we try to turn all the ambience down, it's going to sound quite unnatural, like I'm in some sort of vocal booth. So it's just about getting a blend of that where it still sounds natural.(...) And if I turn it off, hopefully you can hear a lot of noise.

There's a lot competing for my voice in terms of attention. And then if we turn it back on, you should hear that I'm just a little bit more clear. So you could imagine how useful this would be if you were vlogging, you're in a loud environment.

You could just turn everything else down just a little bit, so that your viewers are not distracted by all of that and struggling to hear what you're saying. You still want to let the real world into your recordings. There's nothing wrong with a bunch of noise in the background setting the scene.

We just want to make sure that it's not overtaking the message that we're trying to convey. So clearly, I'm pretty impressed with it. Of course, if you push it too far, it's going to sound unnatural. But right now, I can't find anything free that offers results anything like this.

And the truth is, even if you're using very advanced and quite expensive denoising software, you really have to know what you're doing to get results that are even close to as good as that. It is completely possible. The paid for softwares are good, but almost none of them are just as simple as this. And you can't achieve this with just EQ, compression, gating.

If this could be achieved with normal tools, I would be sharing those normal tools with you, of course. I like keeping it to about -5, -6 dB of reduction. I find that beyond there, things definitely sound a little bit artificial. So use headphones, make sure that you're not losing too much quality and fidelity. But this tool could be so powerful if you're recording vocals in a noisy environment and you just want to turn down all that noise.

Now, the voice reverb, actually having a bit of natural reverb from your room is usually not a problem in a vocal recording. Sometimes it's actually really helpful, gives things a nice quality. But being able to dial in the voice reverb, maybe even increase it or decrease it is also really powerful.

And I find you can push the voice reverb a little bit further before it sounds unnatural, but with the ambiance. 5, 6 dB can be great. It cleans it up enough that you can then use your traditional tools to get fantastic sounding results. My favorite way to use these sorts of tools is to dial them in and then print the results. So I would control this to the amount I'd like.

I would export that as a new WAV file, take a listen and then work with that so that I know that the next time I open up the session, it's going to be exactly the same. It's important to note just to sort of finish this up that nothing is truly free to sign up to this. You do need to give them an email address and after reading the sort of terms of service terms of conditions, I know that they're gathering usage data from the plugin to try and improve their algorithms.

I know this is something that a whole bunch of companies are doing not just in the audio industry. So make sure you read through terms of conditions, terms of service for any app software plugin or service that you're using.

It's really important that you feel in control of your data and where it's actually going. I think what they're going to do is refine this tool a little bit and then make maybe a premium version with a lot more control. That would be pretty cool to see and hopefully they keep this free version where it is. And another interesting discussion perhaps for another time is that the company that makes this is also very focused on AI speech synthesis, which is a really challenging topic.

On one side, you could use that to give a voice back to people who have lost theirs through illness or injury or simply struggle to speak. But then the flip side of that is that you can also generate voices, create a whole load of fake content, hate, negativity. And ultimately with these tools, I think it's in who's using them and what their intention is.

And that's a really interesting conversation that probably needs a whole video in its own right. But let me know if that's something that you're maybe interested in learning more about or have in a chat about. Let me know in the comments down below. But that's everything from me for now.

So thank you for watching. Hope you have a great week and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.