After I linked to the last entry in a post to reddit, user /u/digitalfiz kindly pointed me in the direction of some tools and instruction that would help me “improve the audio and get rid of the background noise.”

When I created the previous videos I didn’t notice any background noise and I was wondering what he was talking about. I listened to them again and I couldn’t figure out how I didn’t hear it before. It was loud. I couldn’t unhear it.

I checked out the video, and while the video was four years old and I couldn’t follow the steps exactly, it was enough to get me going. I downloaded VB-Cable, VSTHost, and ReaPlugs, but couldn’t find BuzMaxi or BuzComp anywhere.

I set up VSTHost with the ReaFir (noise cancellation), ReaGate (gate), and ReaComp (compressor) plugins, (skipping the BuxMaxi limiter plugin) and tried a recording. The background noise was gone, my voice sounded ok, but all of the game sounds sounded tinny. Because this is all new to me I didn’t know what settings to change to remove the tinniness, but I tried a few things to see if they would work.

Then it smacked me.

I realized that MrTimeItself in the video separated the game audio and the voice audio with different processing streams. I had the game audio playing through the computer speakers, getting picked up in the microphone along with my voice, and getting processed the same as my voice.

So I plugged my headphones in to mute the speakers, and opened a second instance of VSTHost to process the game audio. However, I couldn’t figure out how to tell it to take the audio input from what the game is sending to the speakers. Since MrTimeItself was only putting a compressor on his game audio to deal with explosions and gunfire, I decided to abandon using VSTHost on the game audio and set the NCH Debut video capture app to read the unprocessed game audio directly from the speaker output the way I had been doing it before, and to read the processed voice audio from VSTHost via the VB-Cable. It worked like a charm.

Although I’m sure someone with a trained ear will surely find other things to cringe at, to my ear the improvement is like night and day.

Except it only works if I have the sound muted so I either have to play the game with the headphones on, or play the game without hearing the game audio. I can live with that. In this video, I’m not wearing the headphones, so I’m playing without hearing the game audio that you can hear.

Also, for some reason, when I try to save my settings in VSTHost, I get an error message saying “Error saving file” without an explanation why. Until I get that sorted out, I’ll have to write down the settings that I used and reconfigure it each time I do a recording. That’ll be fun.