Advice on cleaning up audio

My podcast’s remote guest and I went through different recording options he had, and his headset (with the mic on the wire) sounded the best. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very careful with it, and there are a lot of noises I’m guessing from rubbing the microphone or the wire against his clothes or head.

Any advice on cleaning this up? I’m on Linux, so cannot use the majority of the commercial vst plugins out there, which are usually only provided for Mac or Windows.

These noises together span a wide frequency range, and I couldn’t remove them effectively with EQ. I also tried Paul’s de-clicker without much success.

I don’t know of any Windows plugins which could differentiate scratchy/scribbly noises from speech.

Any advice on cleaning this up?

If it’s important enough, Hollywood has a solution. Type out the words and the original performer performs the words in a studio environment. If that seems pretty extreme, nobody is going to give up a multi-million dollar movie because a microphone failed at the wrong time during live action.

So the problem is determination and financing, not technology.

Koz