Not long ago, there were few voice enhancement tools for jobs such as noise reduction and reverb reduction.
Now, almost every other week, there seems to be new software available to enhance voices in ways that simply were not possible even a year ago.
I'm writing this in May 2024, so depending on when you're reading this, there may be many for voice enhancement tools than the ones mentioned here.
OpenVINO is much more than just audio. It's an open source venture in generative AI, video, audio, and language.
But for my purposes, it's what they're doing with audio that appeals to me.
I've previously been very frustrated trying to use Audacity as an audio editing app. While I acknowledge that Audacity is capable, stable, open source and free, it feels to me to have a user interface that belongs in the previous century.
But now that there are OpenVINO effects for Audacity, I've been using Audacity much more than ever before.
These are not VST plugins, but coded to integrate into Audacity.
I am not so interested in the Music Generation and Music Style Remix tools. I briefly played with Music Generation and was not very impressed.
What impressed me greatly was Noise Suppression and Transcription tools.
The Noise Suppression reduced noise with fewer artifacts than other paid software I've used costing hundreds of dollars. I was mightily impressed with the results.
The Transcription tool was not 100% accurate, but was much more accurate than any other app or online service I've tried, and automatically included punctuation and quotation marks when the speaker in the recording was quoting from another source.
There's also a very impressive Music Separation tool that can split a song into either it's vocal and instrumental parts, or into four parts: vocals, drums, bass and other instruments.
The only app I've seen do music separation better than OpenVINO is Replay, but only for separation into two parts: Vocal and Instrumental.
Most amazing of all, considering how capable OpenVINO is, is that OpenVINO and Audacity are free.
More about OpenVINO effects for Audacity
This is not a free app. The cost is USD99.
There is a free trial, but it inserts silence into your mix every so often until you activate the software after your purchase.
I was torn between Supertone Clear and DX Revive. Both restored voices in ways that were not possible even a year ago.
I've ended up preferring Clear because it was more user-customisable.
More information about Clear and DX Revive