“Wet” mouth noises are very common in podcasting, and luckily, thanks to an excellent filter from iZotope called Mouth De-Click, you can easily remove them.
This is a gross topic and I’m already cringing as I write it, but it’s important to address. You may hear these wet or click-y noises caused by saliva as one of your panelists speaks, and you know that your listeners won’t want to hear those.
Unfortunately some people always have these noises coming out of their mouths. For others, you may hear them if they recently had something to eat (It’s better than them eating on air!) That’s why I’m grateful for iZotope’s “Mouth De-click” plugin, which is available as part of their RX8 Standard and Advanced apps.
iZotope’s Wet Mouth De-Click Filter window:
Using their presets and a couple of simple sliders, you can easily remove mouth noises from your panelists’ tracks. In my experience this filter has worked really well, and I can no longer imagine my editing life without it. I tend to apply Mouth De-Click on all of my panelists just so I can cover even the rare occasional noise. I’ve found that this plugin doesn’t affect overall sound quality so long as you stick with one of iZotope’s handful of presets, so it’s safe to run all the time.
If you’re finding that iZotope is having a hard time removing clicks from a particularly wet mouth, bring those ‘Sensitivity’ and “Click Widening” sliders further to the right. Just be sure to preview the filtering before applying it, because too much click widening can cause syllables to be dropped.
iZotope’s RX is some expensive software, but it’ll be well worth the investment over the long term. Mouth De-click is my favorite plugin from them, but there are other good ones like De-ess, De-Crackle, De-Reverb, and De-Clip. After purchasing RX, you’ll also be able to add these plugins to audio editors like Adobe Audition.
Mouth De-Click is available in RX7 and the more recent RX8.
