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I am looking for a program that can remove the laugh track from a video file. If possible, free, Windows 7 and can batch process.

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    That's gonna be a tough nut to crack, and you'll still need manual work. The only more or less serious leads I could find are in this Videohelp forum post
    – user416
    Oct 29, 2014 at 15:17
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    KilltheCann.com has a Patent Pending process that is presently in crowd funding to develop a commodity-level device that does just that via your HDMI connector.
    – user25392
    Jul 25, 2016 at 1:27
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    @Geoff: Interesting! I converted your answer to a comment as it is our policy to not have answers about not-yet-released stuff. Cheers! :-)
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Jul 25, 2016 at 4:45
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    Movavi can help you. It is media editing program that remove laugh tracks. Mar 13, 2018 at 8:27
  • Just to add to the Movavi case, the key to the setup is to effectively use a bandwidth filter to remove the laughter from the video via analysis of the existing material. I'm not sure it's necessarily automated. I was tempted to recommend Serif VideoPlus, but it's even more expensive. May 23, 2018 at 10:44

3 Answers 3

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iZotope RX plugin is used to remove instruments bleed from vocal tracks, but I believe you need to provide a separate track which would contain laughter, in order for the plugin to extract the signature. RX is considered as one of the best plugins for these things, so I don't believe there are any ways of doing it automatically.

Similar plugins include MAGIX Spectral Layers Pro and Adobe Audition CC, but I believe iZotope RX is considered the most specialized for de-bleeding.

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Audacity might be worth a try. It can remove background noise and does batch processing.

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Laugh Track Audio Removal

Personally counting Laugh Tracks as Noise is something that I agree with.

Audacity has a Noise Reduction feature, (under Effects), which relies on you selecting a sample with just the "Noise" and no other background and will then subtract that "noise" from the rest of the track even where it is overlaid on other sounds. It is very effective. Since there are a quite limited number of "laugh tracks" used and in many cases the same ones were used throughout entire series of productions, (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_track for more on this), it should be reasonably simple to build up a collection of the offending samples to then apply to multiple files.

Audacity Noise Reduction Help

Audacity is:

  • Free, Gratis & Open Source
  • Cross Platform including Windows 7/10
  • Can be scripted so as to apply the processing to multiple files via Marcos, Nyquist or Python.

But the question is about Videos with Laugh Tracks!

The but is that Audacity does not process Video files. This is not too much of a problem as you can use FFMPEG to split the video and audio tracks to separate files and can combine original video & modified audio files into a single file. You can find the commands to do these operations online reasonably simply and since the operations do not modify the length of the Audio track synchronisation should not be an issue. Of course if you are a python user you can use MoviePy which uses FFMPEG behind the scenes to do the audio/video split, should be able to invoke the Audacity operations on the Audio file and then merge the modified audio with the video. Unfortunately the Noise Reduction Effect is not currently (Aug 2020) available from the scripting interface.

Hang on Noise Reduce is not currently available!

An alternative if scripting is really needed could be to use the noisereduce library from within python. It uses an algorithm is based (but not completely reproducing) on the one outlined by Audacity for the noise reduction effect.

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