I have a fairly quiet piece of music that has a small “click” in it. I first tried to use tools within SONAR 8.5, to remove this click - none of them worked. Then I tried Sony Sound Forge, it also did not remove the clicks. Then I downloaded Audacity - which, by the way, I LOVE - oh my gosh it is so exciting to see an app that does NOISE REDUCTION PROPERLY with an FFT style “teach me what noise is and I will remove it” style GUI - I haven’t had that since Cool Edit Pro died.
ANYWAY - I zoomed in on my click, which is perhaps 2/10th of a second in duration, tried several settings of the click remover, tried running it multiple TIMES on the 2/10th of second part - NO result, the click doesn’t go away, it doesn’t get duller, NOTHING happens.
What am I doing wrong? What SETTINGS should I try? Do I have to run it over and over to get it to work?
Yes it was a shame about CoolEdit. Hopefully the Syntrillium guys are now lying on a beach enjoying life.
You mean the “click” is 2/10th second duration? Wow that’s a massive click.
For single short clicks the “repair” effect works really well, but the maximum selection for “repair” is 128 samples.
Gents - that time estimate could be really off. I can’t TELL how long it is, I can’t SEE the click at ALL - it’s an odd one. I have zoomed in and zoomed in and out and part way in and part way out, and I cannot SEE where it is.
I can hear it, I can get a small selection that seems to contain it, but running the Click Remover tool just does NOTHING at all.
It could well be shorter, or I could heal it in 128 sections - but I don’t know how. I understand how to zoom in and out, but I do not know the best way to isolate this click, and how to actually get the click to go away.
Cool Edit still exists, if you have about half a million dollars to invest in CS4 from Adobe - I’ve seen it, you can still tell it’s CoolEdit even though it has a different name now. It looks awesome, but the price…forget it. I really miss Cool Edit, because I could have FIXED this click with it - and now, I can’t seem to find ANY tool or any method that works…
any ideas?
if I can, I will clip out the one second that contains it for you guys to hear - in a few hours when I get home from work. then maybe you can suggest something…
That would be really helpful.
Assuming that you are using Audacity version 1.3.13 (if you’re not, you should upgrade - you can check the version in “Help > About Audacity”).
Select a few seconds of the track that includes the click and from the File menu select “Export Selection” and Export it as a WAV file.
The file can then be uploaded to the forum using “Upload Attachment” which is below the compose message box.
Please find attached the one second sample, the click (which I think was a reverb artifact, not a “normal” click) is about half way through the one second, maybe at .4 or .5 - I can’t quite tell.
If you can tell me exactly how to ZOOM (and I tried everything, I could not really establish a “visual” that I felt might “be” the click, and running the de-clicking tool on a broader area had ZERO effect on it).
I don’t quite get how I can zoom in to a particular “size” of 128 samples, if you can explain how to do that, and give me a step by step, I’d love to try again.
Unfortunately, my blasted HP POS laptop is playing silly bgrs with my sound card, refusing to MAKE any sound for the last TWO hours. I have never spent two hours doing a two minute job. Eventually, I went to ANOTHER MACHINE to create the sample!
Click on the track name and select “Spectrum”.
The click is now clearly visible, and is actually two clicks close together, as can be seen by the two little vertical lines:
So now we zoom in close on the clicks - I prefer to use the mouse wheel for navigating around a track. Ctrl + Mouse Wheel to zoom, Shift + Mouse Wheel to scroll. Alternatively you can use the zoom buttons.
Zooming in on the centre of the first click:
Now switching back to the normal waveform view and you can see that scratchy bit of waveform that is producing the click:
We just need to select a little but tighter to get a selection that is no more than 128 samples:
And now we can apply the “Repair” effect:
And that looks much better.
Now to do the same on the second click - here it is before repair:
And after repair:
And here’s the WAV file:
I cannot thank you enough for this. I will try it now and see if I can actually replicate your instructions in situ in the actual track.
Interestingly, in the part where you say “now switch back to normal waveform view” and you can see the shape of the click - and I had zoomed in on that section during my attempts, and I believed it to be the click - but I think what happened was, I never zoomed down to the 128, so my click removals didn’t work.
Alternately, I would have even been happy to use an erase tool to scrub out the fuzzy bits, but if the click removal tool works (and it sure looks like it does) that will be excellent.
Trebor noted that even after the click removal, there are still echoes and reverbs - but I think having the click gone should at least bring the area into conformity enough that you won’t notice it - I hope.
Everyone - I cannot thank you enough, especially you Steve for this very detailed instruction - that is EXACTLY what I need, and I am off now to give it a try.
I understand the instructions 100000% - very clear
I zoom in, switch to Spectrum - I can see the two spikes, just as in your png file
However, and this is the actual problem - once I’m at this stage, the selection tool just STOPS WORKING. I try to place the cursor very near to one of the spikes - and it doesn’t move. I am very new to Audacity, and I am finding the timeline VERY frustrating - it doesn’t always seem to “track” when you zoom out or in, and I am NOT CLEAR about how to select a “section” - I can kinda do it, I can get the two little grey arrows, and stretch them apart or together - but then, I can’t select the cursor to put it inside of that, say, for loop play
The selection tool just seems to die when zoomed in, and work when zoomed out. My computer is not underpowered, it’s a very new HP laptop.
I could easily DO this, if I could get the cursor to move to where I want it to - but it just won’t, I’ve never felt so frustrated - because I totally understand how to fix this, but, when I try to - it doesn’t WORK.
Because of what Trebor said, I also tried repairing some apparent “repeats” of the two spikes, almost could not see them.
But I made a few too many repairs, and ended up with a bit of a whoosh/pop feel on playback, so I am going to go in again, fix the two main ones, and see if I can live with it.
The most important thing is, I CAN actually do this now - and, the repair tool does work - but, you can’t do TOO many repairs, or you start to hear a negative effect in playback.
That is a surprisingly common problem, but we have no idea why it is so common. Perhaps people select “Snap To” when the time units are on milliseconds and don’t notice that it is doing anything until they have forgotten that they ever selected it? What do you think? Any theories?
