🎧 How to Remove Breathing Sounds from Dialogue in Adobe Audition

Even the best voice recordings can include unwanted breathing noises between phrases.
While natural breathing adds realism, excessive or loud breaths can distract listeners — especially in podcasts, audiobooks, and narration.
Adobe Audition provides precise tools to reduce or remove these sounds automatically while keeping your dialogue natural and expressive.

In this guide, you’ll learn several techniques to clean up breathing sounds quickly and effectively.

How to Remove Breathing Sounds from Dialogue in Adobe Audition

1. Identify Breathing Sounds

Before editing, it’s important to locate and understand what you’re removing.

In Waveform View: Breaths appear as small, smooth waveforms between spoken phrases.
In Spectral Frequency Display (Shift + D): They appear as soft, airy bands between 1–5 kHz.

💡 Pro Tip: Not all breaths need to be deleted — gentle, natural breaths help the voice sound human. Focus only on the loud or distracting ones.

2. Reduce Breaths Manually

For precise control:

Select the breath region in Waveform View.
Use the Fade Tool or press Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + D to reduce its volume.
Bring the level down by –10 to –20 dB (instead of deleting).

🎧 Pro Tip: Use the Gain Handle on the clip to make fine adjustments without cutting.

3. Use the Auto Heal Tool

When a breath is too short to fade smoothly:

Switch to Spectral Frequency Display.
Highlight the breath area.
Go to Favorites → Heal.

Adobe Audition blends the surrounding sound to remove the breath seamlessly.

💬 Tip: This works great for single inhales between phrases in audiobooks.

4. Apply Dynamics Processing for Automatic Control

To reduce multiple breaths across a recording:

Go to Effects → Amplitude and Compression → Dynamics Processing.
Choose the “Vocal Leveler” preset.
Adjust the curve slightly to compress soft breaths while maintaining natural speech.

💡 Pro Tip: This doesn’t remove breaths completely but evens out their volume relative to dialogue.

5. Use the Essential Sound Panel

The Essential Sound Panel can automatically manage loudness and dynamics — including breathing sounds.

Tag your clip as Dialogue.
Enable Repair Sound.
Adjust Reduce Noise (around 20–30%) and DeReverb (10–15%).
Under Clarity, activate Dynamics to smooth out sharp volume jumps.

🎧 Pro Tip: Combine this with Auto Ducking for background music so breaths are even less noticeable.

6. Use Spectral Editing for Stubborn Breaths

For breaths that sit in higher frequencies:

In Spectral View, highlight only the light-colored breath area (usually between 2–4 kHz).
Use the Spot Healing Brush Tool or Lasso Tool to erase or reduce it.
Preview often — removing too much can make the audio sound “choppy.”

7. Remove Breaths Automatically with a Third-Party Plugin (Optional)

For long-form audio like audiobooks, consider automation:

Use plugins like iZotope RX De-breath or Waves DeBreath.
These integrate with Audition and automatically detect breaths based on frequency and timing.

💡 Pro Tip: Even when using plugins, fine-tune manually for the most natural sound.

8. Batch Process Multiple Clips

If your session includes many takes or voice files:

Save your settings as a Preset in the Effects Rack.
Open Window → Batch Process.
Add all files and apply your preset.

This applies consistent breath reduction to every clip in one step.

Conclusion

Breathing sounds are a natural part of human speech — but with Adobe Audition, you can decide how much of that realism you want to keep.
By combining manual editing, spectral cleanup, and smart automation, your dialogue will sound smooth, controlled, and listener-friendly.

Next up: “How to Automate Volume Changes with Envelopes in Adobe Audition.”