Silence the Vuvuzalas – those (to some) annoying buzzing horns from the world cup can be gone with Media Center and FFDShow

For a lot of people the spectacle of the world cup is being spoilt by the incessant buzzing of the local Vuvuzala horns. Whilst I have no problem with these and think they are part of the atmosphere, I thought I would try and find a way to help out those whom they do annoy.

Fortunately if you have set up Media Center with FFDShow’s Audio Filter you can use FFDShow’s  Graphic Equaliser to substantially remove the Vuvuzala noise.

If you haven’t set up the FFDShow Audio Filter you can use my Media Center Decoder Utility  http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2009/04/announcing-mcdu-media-center-decoder.html to do this. First install FFDShow. Then run my utility and select FFDShow as the Audio codec. You then need to restart Media Center.

Open up the FFDShow audio settings and choose the equalizer options. The horns play around the 233 range in the equaliser – the nearest to this is 250 so we will reduce this to the minimum then click apply,

You may find you want to increase the 125 and 500 ranges to compensate for a bit of loss of depth in the commentary.

This doesn’t get rid of the buzz completely but it certainly reduces it. You could also increase the + and -db ranges to 120 from 12 to give you a bit more control.

Now I have also found that 470, 700, 940, 1171, 1400 and 1630 are fairly strong harmonics generated by the Vuvuzela and you may want to reduce 500 and 1000 to reduce these but this will affect the commentary quality – which may not be a bad thing.