So, I recorded a guitar track with this really crappy computer mic last night and I’d rather not record it again. I loaded it up into Audacity, and I’m able to recognize where the static is happening, but Noise Removal and Click Removal on the new beta doesn’t work. I’m kind of a n00b when it comes to editing, and I’m still learning Equalization. But, here’s a couple of screenshots of the static in the spectrum (zoomed really closely);
Here’s the overall spectrum. The static is characterized by the unusual spikes relative to the rest of the wave.
“If the click is not suitable for silencing, try using the Draw Tool by clicking the pencil icon top left of the Audacity screen, or press F3 on your keyboard. The mouse cursor will change to a pencil while over the audio track. You may need to zoom in a little further to use the tool. Simply click in the track at the point you wish the sample to be redrawn to, and wait for the samples to be rejoined together. Alternatively, click in the area of track where the line of samples is not smooth and hold down ALT on your keyboard. The cursor will now change to a brush. Each mouse click will progressively redraw the samples in the area so as to smooth out their contour. When clicking has no further effect, the samples are as smoothly drawn as possible.”
I have had “static” like clicks before as in your last screen shot you uploaded but they generally weren’t too much of a problem so long as they didnt reach -1db. The draw tool should be able to reduce the severity of this “static” but you may still hear some noise. its much harder to get rid of if your peaks reach -1db and you will find this method a little frustrating if youve got a lot to edit but it does work pretty well.
Cool! That helped a lot. I was able to run the track thru the Low Pass Filter and that also helped a lot. It made it easier to isolate the bad cracks and correct them.
You may be overloading the microphone. If you had electrical interference, I would expect the spikes to be all over the place, but they’re not. Each spike is on a musical peak and it always happens on negative peaks and it always generates a positive spike. I bet if you backed off from the microphone all the problems would vanish.
In techie terms, when the microphone overloads, it generates bogus sound data instead of just clipping. The decoder sees the data errors and tries to make them back into music and it doesn’t work very well.
Recording live performances is a lot harder than it looks. The range of loudnesses is larger than most electronics and microphones can handle. It’s up to the recording engineer to make it all fit.
I’ve recorded performances with $24 microphones and hand-me-down mixing desks. Yes, you do have to pay attention, but I always got a presentable show out of it.
