Awesome Linux Game Tools: NoiseTorch-ng
Awesome Linux Game Tools is a series of reviews showcasing the finest tools for Linux gamers.
NoiseTorch-ng (let’s call it NoiseTorch) is billed as an “easy to use open source application for Linux with PulseAudio or PipeWire”. The software creates a virtual microphone that suppresses noise.
Noise suppression is a pretty old topic in speech processing, dating back to at least the 1970s. As the name implies, the idea is to take a noisy signal and remove as much noise as possible while causing minimum distortion to the speech of interest.
NoiseTorch uses RNNoise, a noise suppression library based on a recurrent neural network (RNN). A RNN is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. RNNs are particularly effective for background noise removal because they can learn patterns across time which is essential for understanding audio.