Cleaning up tracks

by Allen Lyne
(Adelaide)

I use Audacity to record Audio Books. The editing process is laborious. One of the major tasks is cleaning up the tracks between the spoken words. No matter how careful you are in the recording--and some of my recordings are of 4 hours duration--there are breaths that are too loud, lip and tongue noises, coughs, etc. When I start an edit, I find a piece of track that has absolutely no noise on it. I highlight a small bit, listen to make sure it's clear of noise, hit control c. As I work through the track, I highlight any bits with noise and hit control v.
I don't use the noise removal tool as this results in distortion--maybe it works for music, but not for speech.