Hi all!
First of all, apologize for my English…
Actually, I have a number of old 33 RPM discs of classic music to digitalize.
I work with a Lenco L75 disc player and all works fine, but some record must be repaired to remove glitches and, sometimes, clipping.
Some recordings are not of very good quality in fact there are some clipping (where volume was very high). This occurred during master disc recording: NOT from disc to Audacity.
I tried to “correct” manually these clipping, doing a sort of plausible “extrapolation”:
- Select all
- Effects >Volume> -3 dB
- select the “flat” portion
- Effects >Repair
This is very tedious and it would be fine if exists a plugin that:
- finds a steepness change to flat
- select until the flat portion ends, changing to steepness
- apply Repair
Anybody is able to write a plug-in like that?
(I looked at the Forum but I have no skill to write it by my own).
Thank you in advance!
Have you looked for CD or MP3 replacements? It’s hard to get “digital quality” from a record. Personally, I only digitize when the recording isn’t available digitally.
There is a Clip Fix effect but it’s impossible to know the original unclipped wave shape or height. When I tried it on some bad sounding “loudness war” CDs it made the waveform LOOK better but it didn’t improve the SOUND, at least not significantly. 
I assume it works better with “clean” clipping but these CDs have all kinds of compression & limiting, etc.
As a general rule, distortion can’t be fixed. But… AI is getting smarter every day and it can create recordings that don’t exist so I assume that it will eventually be able to make new cleaner productions of bad-old recordings.
That might be a problem because the analog record cutting & playback process doesn’t retain the squared-off wave shape but of course it doesn’t fix the sound of the distortion/clipping. And if it was analog clipping, it’s sometimes not that “square” at the tops & bottoms.
For clicks & pops, there is the Click Removal effect.
Or there are special applications for cleaning-up clicks & pops. Wave Corrector is fully automatic, and now free. (I don’t have much experience with it.)
I also have Wave Repair ($30 USD). It offers several repair methods and it can do audibly perfect repairs of most (but not all) clicks & pops. But it’s manual so you have to find & fix the defects one at a time and It sometimes takes me a weekend to fix-up an LP! But that also means that it only “touches” the audio where you identify a defect.
Wave Repair can PROBABLY repair a VERY-short clipped wave, but not a distorted section that lasts for any period of time.
Antonio,
Is this useful to you? It’s from ChatGPT.
If you’re specifically looking for public domain or freely available classical music recordings, here are the top resources — IMSLP is still useful, but there are others focused more heavily on audio:
1. IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library — https://imslp.org
- Where to look: Go to a composer/work page, and scroll down to the “Recordings” section.
- What’s available: MP3, FLAC, and MIDI files
- Note: Quality and availability vary; some are professional, others are amateur or synthesized.
- Focus: Royalty-free classical music recordings and sheet music
- What’s special:
- All recordings are either public domain or Creative Commons
- High-quality performances (some commissioned by Musopen)
- Offers streaming and downloading (free account needed for full access)
- Search by composer, instrument, era, or mood
- Includes: Educational tools, curated playlists, and even a radio stream
- Focus: Streaming licensed classical recordings
- Note: Not all free, but offers some complimentary content
- Good for: Discovering works across many performers/labels
- Search for: “Classical music recordings,” “78 RPM,” “public domain music”
- What’s there:
- Huge range of vintage recordings (some rare early 20th-century performances)
- Whole LPs and shellac disc transfers
- Mix of classical, folk, and other genres
- Tip: Use the “Audio > Music & Arts” category and search by composer
- From: Europeana, the EU digital heritage platform
- Includes: Historic recordings, manuscripts, and photos from European libraries and archives
Summary:
| Platform |
Focus |
Pros |
Limitations |
| IMSLP |
Scores + some recordings |
Huge archive |
Recordings limited/inconsistent |
| Musopen |
Recordings + education |
High-quality, curated, downloadable |
Free account needed |
| Archive.org |
Old public domain media |
Rare/historic recordings |
Search/navigation less curated |
| CPDL |
Choral music |
Free sheet + some audio |
Mainly scores |
| Europeana |
Digital archives |
Historical content |
Less focused browsing |
Mark B
2. Musopen — 
3. Classical Archives — 
4. 
5. Europeana Music —