Aireo · Guides · Remove mic bleed

Remove mic bleed (crosstalk) between several mics

Mic bleed (also called crosstalk, or « repisse » in French studios) is what one person's mic picks up from the other voices when several mics are recording at once. On voices, a simple noise gate handles it badly : you have to analyse the mics together. Here's why, and how to remove it automatically.

What is mic bleed?

As soon as two people talk in the same room, each with their own mic, every mic captures its own voice… but also, fainter and slightly delayed, everyone else's. That's mic bleed. You hear it as a "doubled" voice, a roomy feel, and a constant background : even when one person speaks, you hear the others' open mics.

The more mics, the bigger the problem, and the harder it is to fix once the tracks are mixed together. That's why you always work better from the separate mics, one file per person.

Why a noise gate isn't enough on voices

The classic fix is a noise gate : it mutes a mic while the sound stays below a threshold. On drums, that works. On voices, it's another story :

• It chops off word starts and ends, breaths, voiced phrase tails : the voice becomes choppy and artificial.
• When two people talk at once, the threshold no longer knows what to cut : the bleed gets through anyway.
• It can't tell the mic's real voice from the others' bleed : both sit above the threshold.

To do it cleanly, you have to compare the mics against each other, moment by moment, and work out who is really talking, not just watch a level on a single mic.

How to remove mic bleed automatically

The reliable approach is to analyse all the mics together : at each moment, identify the mic carrying the most direct voice, and attenuate that same voice on the others. This preserves the real speech and removes the spill, without chopping the sound.

That's exactly what Aireo's multi-mic autolevel does. From your separate mic files, it :

• balances the levels of the mics against each other (a quiet guest and a loud host end up at the same volume) ;
• removes the bleed each mic catches from the other voices ;
• cleans up reverb, background noise and room echo along the way ;
• does all of it 100% on your machine, with nothing uploaded.

In practice, in three steps

1. Drop your separate mic files (one per person) into Aireo, or an AAF edit from Premiere or DaVinci.
2. Run it. Aireo lines up the mics, removes the bleed and cleans each voice automatically.
3. Get a mix-ready base, or files ready to publish. The original is never touched.

Tip : remote tools that record one track per guest (Riverside, Zencastr, SquadCast) are ideal, exactly what Aireo needs to remove the bleed well.

Frequently asked questions

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