Tiny Click on edit points

This is annoying, weird and never happened on Audacity until now. When I join two pieces of audio together either on one track or alongside each other on multiple tracks, somehow a click is produced on one or both of the edges of the edits. It’s low, but loud enough to hear, like a scratch on a vinyl record. I literally have to create a fade to make it go away. No matter what I do – start the edit in different places, restart the whole edit, reboot the laptop, etc, these clicks reappear out of nowhere. Garage Band used to do this. It is a colossal time eater. Help please?

There’s three different ways to get a click at edits.

Probably the most annoying one that’s almost impossible to find in its smallest form, one of the two clips has DC Offset.

You can use Effect > Normalize with only [X] Remove DC Offset checked. You have to do this to all the work in your show ahead of time. You can’t do it after the click already occurred. Sometimes you can magnify the vertical display to see which clip doesn’t naturally settle around zero and only correct that one.

You can get clicks by editing in the middle of a waveform and editing on wrong cycles. Note stereo editing messes up most ways of combatting this problem as you need to patch two sound channels, and they’re different.

This is an illustration of fixing one without the other. The edit has been performed at the zero crossing points, but it got the waveforms exactly wrong.

I don’t have an illustration for the last one, but picture a blue wave that doesn’t have graceful up and down motion but has at least one vertical chop. That’s a Tick waiting to happen.

There is a setting in Audacity that says to always edit at zero-crossing points. Any minute I’m going to find it. Please note the edit may not occur at precisely where you want it for most of these solutions.


Video editors have no option of where to cut. They have video frame boundaries and need to conform to them. They always do quick cross-fades. If you like to do very rapid, precise frame-by frame edits, this will drive you nuts, so in that case, you have to do the audio in an external sound editor.

Koz

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/select_menu_at_zero_crossings.html

Koz

Screen Shot 2018-03-11 at 19.39.04.png
Koz

Wow. Thank you!

The first thing is; whenever possible, make your edits start and end where the audio is silent.
If that is not possible, then for music, try to start and end at “zero crossing points” immediately before strong beats in the music. The onset of the beat will mask any click that may occur.

Sometime with stereo tracks, it can be impossible to find a zero crossing point that is common to both channels, in which case, do the best you can, and if there is a slight click, use the “Repair” effect to fix it (http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/repair.html)