We recorded a performance that has substantial speaker crackle, and would like to repair it somehow.
I’ve tried lowering gain, using compressor, limiter, and a few others, but can’t seem to correct it.
Could anyone help me to use the EQ to rid the crackle please.
It happens on low bass, but even when there’s a smaller signal.
Is it distortion or overload? I’m not up on the difference between the two.
Thank you in advance.
Could be skipping aka drop-outs.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips
All the sound is there, it’s just the speakers are crackling on playback on different speakers, on medium ones (100w) through a NAD stereo amplifier, and also from a laptop with small (8w) powered speakers.
The exported audio was mp3 with insane preset also has the crackling.
What’s strange is that before I’d only experienced that with the full signal of the audio redlining, whereas now the signal is in the green and yellow.
I am using Audacity 3.4.2 on MX-15 Linux.
MIC to close or inadequate , Lower recording levels ( around -18to-6 dB )
Try recording in 32bit
Use vinyl declicker and decrackler
IF your using line in lower out put source and recording source both at -6dB you can always
normalize at the file level.
Sometimes the bass freq. may over power the input line or MIC. ( VOLTAGE)
IN any case this is happening at the input …
Are you using a line signal on a MIC input ???
GOOD LUCK
I don’t quite understand the setup: You say “recorded a performance that has substantial speaker crackle” so I assume the performance was transmitted through loudspeakers and you recorded what came out of the LS. So now the LS crackle is part of your useful signal.
Later you write “the speakers are crackling on playback on different speakers” which sounds to me like the recording itself is good, and the crackling only occurs when playing back the recording. Please clarify.
If the former is true then I doubt that you can fix it in the frequency domain (with EQ, Filters), as the crackling is a temporal phenomenon - as opposed to eg. a constant hum or noise.
I de-cracked a numer of old vinyls manually as follows:
- locate the crack by ear
- zoom in on the signal until you can clearly see the anomaly in the waveform. This may need to go down all the way until you can see individual samples
- mark the affected range and apply the “repair” effect. Note that this effect only works for a range of less than 128 samples (< 1ms). So for a “wide” noise you may have to apply several times
- zoom out, play back and check if the crack disappeared
- if you picked the wrong one, undo and try again
Over time your eye will develop a sense for typical signal patterns of such cracks, which make it easier to tell from the wanted signal. However it is a very tedious process. On some vinyls I had to fix several hundreds of such cracks, so this does take a while.
Those were historical records of a very limited bandwidth (~ 8kHz) so a sharp crack (producing higher frequencies) was easy to tell from the wanted signal. It may be more difficult if the crack is part of a modern recording of broad frequency range in the wanted signal.
Good luck - and patience 