Now that telecommuting for work will likely continue to be the norm, people are communicating more and more by audio and video. In fact, many professional creators are now running projects from their home setup.
Not all digital content is created equal, however. Audio quality, for one thing, is a key factor that distinguishes between mediocrity and excellence. Noisy and imbalanced audio is distracting, often causing the audience to click away. As a remedy, you need professional-standard microphones and sound booths, which are, unfortunately, rare finds in a home configuration.
So what can you do? Just keep producing poor audio?
Luckily, no. Modern technology is here to help.
One solution is Dolby’s Enhance API, which improves, transforms, and corrects audio. Besides describing that API’s features along with a real-world example, this article also explains how to leverage them alongside Cloudinary to enhance video as a whole.
Who knows? After reading this piece, you might be inspired to spruce up your audio with the tips. Every success originates from a single step.
Features of Enhance API
Dolby’s Enhance API helps businesses augment the audio of their media, streaming, and communications with the following capabilities:
- Removal of unwanted background noise, which eradicates ambient noise: wind, traffic, air conditioners.
- Correction of loudness, which balances the volume of the overloud or overquiet voices on budget microphones.
- **Isolation of adaptive speech, which makes primary sounds stand out from the background, e.g., by enhancing a speaker’s voice while minimizing the crowd’s chatter.
- Reduction of sibilance, which lowers, with four different intensities, the natural hissing sounds that tend to arise when people say such words as “sip” or “zip.”
- Removal of plosives, which eliminates wind and popping sounds.
- Balance of talkers, which raises the voice of those who talk softly and moderates the volume if multiple people are talking.
Listen to this noisy and unbalanced audio of Teddy Roosevelt and then compare it to this enhanced version, which makes use of most of the Enhance API’s attributes. You’ll immediately detect the difference: The processed version, significantly quieter and more even keeled, delivers a much more pleasant listening experience.
You can create high-quality audio with the Enhance API for countless purposes—from podcasts to EdTech solutions to social media and live events—and you don’t need an audio engineering background to do that. For details, check out Dolby’s extensive documentation.
Enhanced Live Audio In Action
Have a look at a real-life example.
Cloudinary’s video podcasts, MX Matters and DevJams, which focuses on media trends worldwide, features interviews with international creators who share their expertise. Because we aren’t all audio professionals, creators talk with whatever devices we have, often ones with subpar built-in microphones. The result is a poor listening experience for the listeners.
On the flip side, those speakers with top-grade audio equipment are a stark contrast. Thanks to the superior audio setup, their presentations sound fantastic: no balance issues, no background noise, no inappropriate loudness.
After researching solutions to improve the listener experience, Cloudinary found that they could run MX Matters through the Enhance API and generate audio quality that’s comparable to that produced by the guests with professional equipment. The refined tracks are clean, balanced, and more polished and presentable than the original—a pleasure to listen to.
The Cloudinary Accompaniment
Cloudinary helps businesses generate captivating visuals and user-generated content (UGC) with APIs. If you’re already leveraging Cloudinary for those ends, why not also adopt Dolby’s audio-enhancing capabilities? Subsequently, you’ll reap an enjoyable audio-visual experience for your audience without investing in sophisticated equipment.
Here’s a workflow to consider for using the Enhance API with Cloudinary-hosted content:
- Extract the audio from the video.
- Clean, enhance, and transform the audio with Dolby’s Media Processing APIs.
- Stitch the enhanced audio back into the video before applying Cloudinary’s features.
By storing audio, video, and image files on Cloudinary, you have two options for optimizing the audio without impacting your application:
- Write code for a new upload to process the audio file through the Enhance API and then upload the enhanced version to Cloudinary.
- Build a function to fetch the audio, process the audio file through the Enhance API, and then reupload the enhanced version to Cloudinary.
Closing Thoughts
Audio quality can make or break projects. To clearly distinguish your sound recording from the background noise, turn up your audio game. An easy and economical way to do so is to give your audio tracks a professional makeover with Dolby’s Enhance API, which has proven to be inordinately helpful for businesses and projects that rely on UGC, for creators on a limited budget, and even for companies with remote employees.
Combine the Enhance API with Cloudinary, and you’ll be able to master your digital brand and position your content up there with the pros. That’s because Cloudinary not only serves as a repository for your imagery, audio, and video, but also seamlessly integrates them across all the platforms you’re on.
Bottom line: Cloudinary offers endless possibilities for enhancing digital content, requiring no audio or video engineering expertise whatsoever. Visit Cloudinary for details.
