Erase-Suppress Barking When Two People Are Recorded

Question

Hello one and all. I agree Adobe Audition is complex. The tutorial looks good as they even explain what sound is, exactly. Adobe paid $16.5 million for the rights to Cool Edit and renamed it Adobe Audition. I needed something like this for a cassette tape mistakenly recorded which sounds slow, fast and too quiet. I was willing to plunk down money for something like Audacity, which is absolutely free. Audacity doesn't gobble up program icons through file type associations like Audition does. I don't even understand what the Adobe Audition finer points are. I thrashed through Audacity by trial and error. I watched the movie "The Conversation". I was wondering if anyone knows if dog barks can be erased or suppressed from recordings of the human voice. In other words, if two people are talking and there are two dogs barking as the people are talking, can Adobe Audition eliminate the dog barking? And if one of the human voices is too quiet for 30 seconds, can Adobe Audition increase the volume of the quiet voice? Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Audition costs money, Audacity does not. Audition is more complex than Audacity? I think that's fair, and what you'd expect, actually. Complex can sometimes be a good thing: it means that you have many tools and advanced options. That's great! That said, personally I do not find Audition overly complex; it's perhaps slightly different than Audacity, but basic editing is very smooth IMO. I get the general impression from you post that you should spend some time with the manual and/or actually walk through those tutorials. Then come back and judge.
Barking can be removed / muted when you use the Spectral view in Edit mode. Loud sounds can be seen as bright dots, and these can be painted away with the ordinary brush or the Healing brush. Takes some practice, but you can get amazing results, certainly.
"Can Adobe Audition increase the volume of a quiet voice?" Are you just kidding? I'm tempted to say "NO - of course not; it's WAY to complex!!!", but the real answer is yes.
If the quiet voice is half buried in noise, or is weak because it is recorded from a distance and hence drenched in reverb / room sounds, then you're up for a challenge (it it's not, i.e. a clean recording only too soft, then it's easy). It's difficult to remove artifacts and especially roomy sounds without compromising the voice, and this is true for even the most expensive software on the planet. You have just found what I am certain is the best tool available for this type of work within ordinary people's budget, in Audition. You'll find out.