Help removing unwanted 'clicks'

Hi, I’m new to Audacity and editing audio in general - I’m using Audacity version 2.2.2 on windows 7 64bit

I have some .mp4 gameplay videos that have random clicks? spikes? throughout them, that I’m trying to remove from the audio.
I’ve attached a 5 second .wav file with an example at roughly 2 seconds. Sometimes the duration is slightly longer/louder.

So far I’ve tried a few things with no success:

• show clipping indicates no clipping/zero red lines
• ‘normalise’ and ‘clip fix’ effects seem to make no difference, assuming I’m using them correctly, I’ve tried experimenting with the sliders/parameters etc.
• I’ve tried a couple of ‘effect’-‘noise reduction’ youtube walkthroughs, (grabbing the noise profile of a section then applying reduction it to the whole clip)

any advice or can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!

I can’t listen 'cause I’m at work.

You can try [u]Click Removal[/u] or [u]Repair[/u].

Are these clicks in the original or did it happen during recording? …Of course it’s best to prevent defects.

• show clipping indicates no clipping/zero red lines
• ‘normalise’ and ‘clip fix’ effects seem to make no difference

Normalizing simply “maximizes” the volume without affecting sound quality.

[u]Clipping[/u] is distortion (not noise) and it doesn’t sound like a click.

• I’ve tried a couple of ‘effect’-‘noise reduction’

Noise reduction is for constant low-level background noise, like background hiss or hum.

That’s a drop-out : there’s about 10 milliseconds missing …

10 ms is too long to use Audacity’s repair tool: it can only interpolate 128 samples.
If it was Audio only, (no video), try deleting any silence exceeding 128 samples, then use the repair tool.

But if it’s video that will shift the sound out-of sync.
Can copy nearby sound to patch the gap and preserve synchronization with video , (a bit like cloning in photo-shop) …

If you increase***** the CPU-priority of Audacity that could prevent the drop-outs from occurring.
(***** from “normal” to “above normal” ).

Thanks for the replies,

Are these clicks in the original or did it happen during recording? …Of course it’s best to prevent defects

Yep the clicks are in the original, they are from ps3 gameplay recordings and I heard the defects whilst playing, yep next thing to do is to see about preventing them as I’ve had the same issue recording with different consoles and recording devices connected to the same pc.

Yes they are video’s of gameplay, so i’ll try these suggestions. The original recordings were’nt recorded using audacity,
so with so many hours of footage with random drop-outs I was seeing if there was a way to apply some kind of fix to the whole
file, or finding the dropouts in each recording easily.
( Next time I record I will try giving the recording CPU-priority to try preventing them in the first place)

Thanks again for the info!

The drop-outs show up clearly in Audacity’s spectrogram view, if you change the window size from 1024 (default) to 64 …

Thanks Trebor this is a great help