When I heard that Nvidia released a program called RTX Voice, I assumed it was another program capitalizing on the stay at home orders and copying the success of Zoom, which has its own audio cleanup functions already. The fact that it uses your Nvidia RTX Graphics card was just another, “why is this necessary?” drop in the bucket. It had all the buzz words of a pop marketing bandwagon bomb: AI, RTX, Video Conferencing.
I didn’t give it another thought until about 5 days after the beta was released, Linus Tech Tips other Youtube channel, Short Circuit, did a review on it. I watched out of boredom and was quickly impressed.
Short Circuit RTX Voice Test
Buzzwords aside, RTX Voice actually did a good job in their test of cleaning up very noisy audio including banging on the desk, typing, a vacuum, children in the background, and even a bullhorn.
It just so happened that also that week I started looking at footage I shot from a recent camping trip to Toadstool Geological Park where most of the narrative audio in the videos was completely destroyed by 30 mph winds. I was loathing trying to clean the audio up using my standard tools in Adobe Audition.
That’s when it hit me. What if I could use this RTX Voice program to clean up audio that was already recorded? All I was concerned about was keeping my spoken words, I didn’t need anything else saved or cleaned and that’s exactly what RTX Voice looks like it is designed to do.
The only problem is I have an Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card, not one of the newer RTX cards that this program required. However, after a bit of Googling, I found out that RTX is more of a marketing label (see my complaints in paragraph 1) and not a requirement, at least in this version of the Beta.
With a bit of editing to the install files, the program would happily run on an older GTX card. (See instructions at the bottom of the page) Thus, the video above was ready to be made and the tests could proceed.
I picked 3 candidate videos, one from the South Dakota Travel blog where I was standing under a very loud HVAC system which was causing a constant buzz and then 2 videos with varying levels of wind. I figured the HVAC would be easy because it was just a constant buzz. Wind is nearly impossible to clean completely because you can’t create a pattern off of it to use as a clean up template.
To see listen to the tests yourself, watch the video, listen to the samples below, or download the sample files I used to test. Each file has first, the original, unedited audio recording. Then it has the recording as processed by RTX Voice. In the case of the Very Easy File, the third copy is a quick edit using Adobe Audition cleanup tools.
Overall I was very impressed, especially since I’m guessing the AI hasn’t been trained much on wind since it’s designed for cleaning up the sounds that would be present when doing a game stream or remote meeting. There were some high pitched artifacts still on the HVAC recording that I was surprised it wasn’t able to remove, but it is only in Beta. I was extremely impressed when it removed the sound of a child in the background of my recording which I would not have been able to do myself in Audition.
I think this idea has merit as a potential workflow improvement tool in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Adobe comes out with a Content Aware Audio Processing Agent in the future to delete unwanted sounds. I’m looking forward to seeing how RTX progresses as it moves towards full release.
How to get RTX Voice to Run on a GTX Graphics Card
Instructions as of 2020-04-28.
I used RTX Voice Beta 0.5.12.6.
Requires Geforce Driver 410.18 or newer.
Requires an Nvidia Graphics Card and Windows.
These instructions are only for GTX Cards.
RTX Cards can install as normal.
- Try to install the RTX Voice Beta. It will fail saying an RTX Card is Required
- Open the file C:\temp\NVRTXVoice\NvAFX\RTXVoice.nvi in a text editor
- Delete the following block of code:
<constraints>
<property name="Feature.RTXVoice" level="silent" text-"${{InstallBlockedMessage}}"/>
</constraints> - Save the file
- Run the install again by running C:\temp\NVRTXVoice\setup.exe (Don't run the installer you downloaded. It will overwrite the file we just edited)