Audacity now has a free AI-powered noise suppressor but the machine isn't going to replace a sound engineer anytime soon

Audacity has become the absolute go-to recommendation when it comes to free audio recording software for your PC, and while it's an easy program to start recording with, the built in noise reduction in particular has always been a bit of a bugbear of mine. It's often prone to introducing a lot of digital artifacts into the signal in an effort to get rid of background noise, so when I heard that there was now a new free suite of AI tools based on OpenVINO, including an AI noise suppressor to play with, I had to give them a try.

OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit that's built for running machine learning on Intel desktop and cloud platforms, and these tools have been built by Intel within the platform for Audacity (via CDM). 

Beyond the AI noise suppression tool for podcasts, there's also a "Music Generation" tool designed to generate music from a prompt, or based on existing music, and also a "Music Style Remix" feature that can split a song into its component parts.

It's the noise suppressor in particular that caught my interest as I've had some previous experience engineering a podcast or two, and I always sought to use expensive VST plugins for background noise removal, as the Audacity default effect can be a bit of a blunt object. It's not awful by any means, but it often introduces digital «wash» into your vocal recordings that can be tiring to listen to.

With that in mind, I downloaded the new tools from Github and got to testing. Grabbing the nearest cardioid condenser mic to hand, I first recorded a test clip in Audacity with a noisy background, in this case my PC fans and a large, open and echo-prone room with a window facing out onto the street. 

I then recorded another clip, and post-processed it with Audacity's built in noise reduction used at a high enough setting that the background noise was removed, before recording a final test clip and trying out the AI tool to see how it compared, and you can hear my results below.

Hmm. While the AI tool can