GameDev Tutorial: Creating sounds with cheap equipment!

Hi!

We indie game devolpers often need sounds. There are already quite some good public domain and Attribution license resources out there, but often you just do not find what you look for. In this case your only choice (if you have no money to spend) is making this stuff yourself.

I am often forced to do so. Having only very crappy equipment and not really the money to buy fancy stuff, I needed to find a way to create sounds in acceptable quality with this very crappy stuff.

This is what I have:

It is a very cheap webcame I "borrowed" (stole XD) from my wife. I use this as my microphone. This can only produce very crappy sound quality with a lot of noise is probably what you are thinking right now. And yes, you are right :D. That's indeed what it does. There is a lot of noise in the sound file that this little thing is able to generate.

But there is this awesome tool you probably already know of -  Audacity!
It is open-source and thus completly free. But it is doing an amazing job on noise removal!

I want to show you how to exploit that!

So when you record something with Audacity, and you have a very bad "microphone", your file might look something like this:

As you can see there is a lot of noise in there. And here is the trick: Before you record your actual sound, let your "microphone" record the "silence" of your room. Something like two or three seconds of silence. After that, record the actual sound.

When you are ready, go and select the silence part of the recording:

After that, go to the menu point "Effect" and select the "Noise Removal" Option:

In the upcoming window, click on the "Get Noise Profile" button:

The window will simply disappear. But Audacity did what it had to do!

Now go ahead and select your whole recording (ctrl+A). After that, go again to Effect--> Noise Removal - but this time, click on the Ok button.
And baaam, the noise is gone!

Audacity does a pretty good job on this. I was able to produce some pretty decent stuff. It may not be the high quality huge game studios can produce, but they also spend a buttload of money on that. And compared to that - one can produce amazing stuff using this very simple technique.

Thanks for reading!