Three projects from the WWDC23 Swift Student Challenge » Sir Apfelot

Ever since the Sir Apfelot Podcast started, improving audio recordings has been a work in progress for me. In my case, I struggle with reverberation and ambient noise as our recording room is far from ideal. Removing this “disturbance” from the audio recordings used to be a very time-consuming task that required a lot of work in post-production. TL;DR: Continue to GOYO

Improving the acoustics with woolen blankets

I have already received a few good tips for improving the room acoustics from a professional in the field (thanks, Ralf!). His tip to hang thick blankets behind the two people who are speaking reduced the reverberation in our recordings considerably. However, the blankets do not help against noise caused by touching cables, fan noise, hard drive vibrations, dogs pattering and other things. I was all the more pleased that Ralf recently wrote to me that I should get the plugin SUPPORT from Supertone should watch.

GOYO: free and quickly installed

The GOYO tool is currently in beta and therefore still free. So you can download it for free and use it as a VST plugin for all kinds of DAWs like Cubase, Logic Pro, GarageBand, FL Studio, Ableton Live and even for my podcast tool Hindenburg. The installation is super-simple, because you double-click the GOYO package and the Mac immediately suggests moving it to the appropriate place for the VST plugins.

What does the GOYO plugin do?

If you look at the GOYO website, the plugin describes itself as a “voice isolator”. You can also find this reference to the function of the tool on the website:

De-noise. De-Reverb. De-Voice. All in One Plugin

So basically it does everything you need to improve voice recording:

• It removes room reverberation.
• It removes ambient noise.
• It allows increasing the level of speech.

And the best thing about it is that you have your own controller for all three things and you can turn the signal in and out as you like. And while Supertone’s plugin is still in beta, it works amazingly well. Luckily I produced a lot of audio recordings that contain all sorts of errors. GOYO can iron them out without exception. Unfortunately, the reverberation in my office is extremely strong because more than half of the walls are made of windows. That’s nice for the view, but very bad for audio recording. But the plugin even gets rid of this extreme reverberation. Also impressive is that there are no artefacts – even when the audio recording includes two speakers.

GOYO vs. Auphonic vs. Adobe Enhance Speech

There are always multiple solutions to every problem. The same applies to bad audio recordings. The tools I’ve tried so far are

• GOYO (Plugin)
• Adobe Enhance Speech (online service – also beta)
• Auphonic (Online-Service)

All tools have their pros and cons, which I will probably detail in another post, but a few brief comments will suffice to draw a comparison with GOYO.

• GOYO works as a plugin in the audio tool of your choice. I use Hindenburg and can edit the recording directly with GOYO and immediately try out the effect and control it using the controls.
• Adobe Enhance Speech is an online service from Adobe that is currently in beta. You can only upload your audio there and get the result back. There are no setting options and the tool makes an all-round improvement. It’s very good at removing reverberation and ambient noise, but clearly struggles when two people are talking at the same time. In our case, artifacts often came back as a result. In the finished audio, this sounds like strange distortions. From my point of view, the audio seems a bit “dead” after the treatment.
• Auphonic is also an online service that offers a little more setting options. For me, Auphonic is currently the best solution, because we have already reduced the reverberation with the suspended ceilings and actually only use Auphonic to improve the voices and automatically adjust the volume between the two speakers. You can also remove background noise with Auphonic, but it didn’t remove reverberation well.

My conclusion to GOYO

The fact that GOYO is currently still free and you can work with it directly in the DAW is very practical. The results I have been able to achieve with it so far are very convincing – even though the final version is not yet available. That’s why GOYO is a pick of the week for me. The operation is extremely easy due to the three controls and understandable for every beginner. I am also a layman in this area and understood it directly and heard the differences in my recordings more than clearly. And the fact that even my friend Ralf is enthusiastic about the tool shows me that this really has to be a very good audio tool. Ralf deals with audio recordings all day long and has hardware and software at his disposal that we hobbyists can only dream of. He can certainly give a more professionally sound assessment than I can. If you want to take a look at GOYO, you can find it at goyo.app. For people who would like to see a video about the GOYO plugin, I have linked one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXyKMCDVd4U