Laptop Noise

[letsgofriday]

Hey guys! So I've been podficcing for a while and have decided it's time to get a proper microphone! I'm considering the Blue Yeti but it's rather pricey, so we shall see. My only worry is that my laptop is loud - I mean really loud. The fan is audible across my large living room, even though I'm half-deaf in one ear

Comments

[greedy_dancer]

In my experience, if you have a good mic it's going to pick up more background noise rather than less. That freaked me out when I first tried my mic (Blue Snowball) because I expected to have better overall sound, not more noise! But the main difference is that although the background noise is picked up, my voice stands out a lot more. This means that as long as your background noise is constant, which I'm guessing your laptop fan is, you can remove the noise in editing (Audacity's noise reduction tool = my favourite thing in the world). Hope that helps! :)

[letsgofriday]

Is the noise removal tool that good? I've used it before while using my laptops internal mic and found that while it did lower the noise, it left a strange... almost metallic quality to the sound?

Thanks!

[greedy_dancer]

Noise removal works best if you already have a pretty good quality, and especially if your voice stands out from the background noise, which should be the case with your new mic. It takes a lot of fiddling with the settings to find the one that'll give the best results and avoid the robot voice effect, though.

[luzula]

Usually the background noise your mike picks up is dependent on the gain, too. If I run my (good-quality) mike on high gain and speak from a distance, it's going to pick up more background noise than if I lower the gain and speak closer to it.

[croissantkatie]

I don't know about mics, but in regards to the noise removal tool it's always worked pretty well for me, although sometimes requires some fiddling of settings. However, Audacity 2.0 has apparently improved the noise removal tool but I don't know how well that works.

[letsgofriday]

It works fairly well for me too but I've found that I end up sounding a bit.... roboty? I'll have to try Audacity 2.0 but I had a bad experience with it once (crashed and lost a lot of work; learned a lesson about saving that day) that makes me kinda :| about it.

[taste_of_water]

Have you thought about recording away from your computer? the first comment in this post there's mentions of something called H2 handy recorder. If you print out the fic or have an ipod touch or similar then you could record wherever you want.

...and I don't really want to say this because the sound is really good but I have a Yeti, my fan isn't that loud and I have built myself a portable sound isolation box and the mic still picks up outside sounds. Your voice will sound really good but if what you're after is complete silence besides your voice without having to fix with the sounds afterwards then this mic might not be for you, have you checked out any reviews on youtube so that you can hear how it sounds?