Now that we have added our microphone let's see at how we can improve the audio quality and how we can check how we sound.
Noise Suppression filter
Select the microphone source, right click and select filters. Only the audio filter options will appear now. If you stay silent for a moment you will see whether your microphone has background noise. You will notice it by the audio meter bar showing a little in the green area. If you have background noise, then you can eliminate it by applying the Noise Suppression filter.
Tip: Noise Suppression is different from Noise Gate. Noise suppression uniformly gets rid of the background noise, whereas Noise Gate applies a mute/unmute effect when the volume goes below or above a certain value. I personally prefer not using the Noise Gate filter, but you can test it and decide what works best for you
Compressor filter
The compressor filter boosts the lows and reduces the highs. So if you talk quietly and then more loud the volume difference will be flattened by the compressor. This filter gives your voice a kind of "radiophonic" effect.
Tip: less is more. Don't add too many filters otherwise you'll mess up your audio
Warning: if you apply multiple filters, the order of filters matter. If the noise suppression is on top of noise gate, then the audio is first processed for noise suppression and then the resulting audio is processed with noise gate.
After you have applied all the filters, you can still adjust the volume with the volume slider in the audio mixer. The audio of a source can also be muted by clicking on the loudspeaker icon.
Monitoring
You can choose where the audio goes. To the output, to your headphones (monitoring) or to both. Right click on the audio source, then Advanced Audio Properties, and then select "Monitor only" or "Monitor and output" if you want to listen to the audio in your headphones. Listening to your voice is useful to understand the impact of the filters you want to apply. You can toggle the filter visibility and adjust settings while you talk and hear yourself. If you don't like hearing yourself or if you, like me, experience a delay in hearing your voice, you can record your audio to evaluate the effect of the different filters.
