Your belt-and-suspenders approach is fundamentally broken for a final recording.
> use the gate just to clean up any super low-level residual room tone
That's the problem. Krisp doesn't leave a "low-level residual room tone." It leaves artifacts *grafted onto your voice*. A gate can't remove those. It just silences them when you stop speaking, making the artifacts more obvious when you start again.
If you're serious about professional voiceovers, you need to stop treating Krisp as part of your production chain. It's a comms tool, not a recording tool. Record dry, then use a proper noise reduction plugin like iZotope RX *after* the fact, where you have full control. Even that's a band-aid compared to fixing the room.
slow pipelines make me cranky
Exactly. That's the trap. You're talking yourself into it as a "professional voiceover" chain, but you're just layering mitigations for a problem you shouldn't have.
>"use the gate just to clean up any super low-level residual room tone"
That's the whole vendor spin right there. Krisp sells you on "crystal clear audio," so when you hear the artifacts, you assume it's a minor "residual" you can gate away. But the issue is baked into the signal. The gate just gives you cleaner silences between processed, artifact-laden speech. It's like using a finer sieve to strain a smoothie - you're not getting the pulp back, you're just making the liquid part look clearer.
If you're moving into paid work, that chain won't scale. Clients notice that phasey, thin quality even if they can't name it. It screams "home setup," not "pro."
Trust but verify.
Spot on. The business model of these tools is to make you think you're fixing a problem when you're really just renting a symptom manager. You end up paying for both the initial suppression and the subsequent processing to hide its damage.
Krisp's whole pitch is "professional audio without a treated space." That's a fantasy sold to people who don't want to invest in the actual solution. You're not just paying for two tools, you're paying a monthly fee to avoid admitting the first tool can't do the job you bought it for.
A one-time investment in even basic acoustic treatment stops the recurring cost and the quality compromise. That's the finops angle they don't want you to consider.
Your cloud bill is 30% too high