I’ve just spent several hours editing a podcast, only to realize on playback that it’s got a lot of clicks in it (I think I was playing it too quietly to hear them, before). I’ve spent a couple of hours poking around and experimenting, trying to see what I can do about this, and I’m pretty sure that they’re dropouts, and further pretty sure that it’s because I have crappy internet (my podcasts are recorded via Libsyn Connect–and it’s noticeable that the clicks are much more frequent on my end than on my guest’s). This is my second podcast–on the first, I had an actual drop of the connection (I was able to simply record a new section to add), but none of these clicks, so that’s a bit odd, and might make my theory less likely.
Anyway, they don’t show up as obvious marks on the waveform, nor as silences (they’re often when I’m speaking), so I can’t seem to manually get rid of them, and click removal did nothing.
Might de-clicker work? The only version I see is from 2014 and I’m not even sure if it’s a mac plug-in. Any other ideas, or do I just have to live with this?
If you play the same short portion of the show multiple times, do the clicks always appear in the same place?
If you record a short, fresh performance exactly like you recorded this one, does it have clicks?
Are you doing all your production on the internal drive, or are you shoveling some of it back and forth to an iCloud drive or some other internet service?
I’ll record another tomorrow, but meanwhile…the first one I did, just like this one, did NOT have any clicks (even though the connection fully dropped at one point).
All the production is on my local internal drive…but this didn’t happen in production, it’s in the original, which was recorded to the Libsyn service online.
The Hollywood solution is get someone to transcribe all the words from the noisy recording and have an actor with a similar voice read them in a studio.
Ha! Super appreciate hopeless-adjacent. I ended up just posting the pod as-is…it’s only in parts of it, and not that bad even when it is there. If this is an ongoing problem, that’ll be another matter altogether, but I’ll restart my computer with just Safari going later this morning when I go to record, and cross my fingers.
PS I’m confused about where it’s happening–if it were a lack of processing “attention” on my laptop, presumably it wouldn’t be at ALL in my guest’s track of the recording…if it were between Libsyn and my computer, same thing. It seems very unlikely to be the Libsyn processors, which I assume are huge, so perhaps it’s just a coincidence that it happened for both me and my guest.
That’s the Google search term. “Noisy Libsyn recordings.” Do they have a library of user info? Do they have actual helpers or their own forum?
Somebody has to apportion the Huge Processors out to individual users. I have new mind-bleed fast internet and it occasionally flat-lines on me.
Magic failures are just the most fun. Developers have a thing they call “Moon Phase Errors.” Sometimes, when the moon is quarter full, the release code catches fire.
When you’re making the recording, does your voice go all the way out to the servers, get recorded and then come back with the guest’s voice? We recommend that people do it that way instead of trying to record both directions in the local machine.
So if the clicks are over both voices, then it has to be something in the far-side machines, or the return pathway. We know that Audacity will stop dead if the data stream stops. So even though you only have barely visible “ticks” in the sound, the recording event could have had much longer holes.
Legacy recording techniques have the producer (you) listening to the show on headphones during the recording. This is so you can stop, fix any problems, and start over. Were you listening, and were the clicks audible? Or are they just too quiet to show up?
Definitely no clicks audible during recording (I do use headphones). The Libsyn Connect app makes a separate track on its server for each of us (in our different locations), then also a mixed track, and then all 3 are downloadable. The clicks were audible on all 3, but most of all on mine.
Today’s recording had none–perfect all the way through, for the first time. (The others all had one or two gaps of about 3-5 seconds, one had the clicks, and one actually lost the connection and I had to re-establish it). So…I think it’s the Moon Phase error, for sure.
Honestly, given that I’m working with a hotspot on a bad cell connection (all that’s available to me here), it’s kind of a miracle it’s working this well…