As many may know, sometimes vocal removal doesn’t work very well. However, there are often sections of the same music just before or after a verse which I have been trying to copy and paste over the vocal remenant. The problem is that there always seems to be a pop or click at the point where I connect one waveform to the previous waveform even though the waveform looks to be continous. Even if I copy a section, then delete that section, and then paste the same section back into its original spot I get the pop/click. Using the pop/click eliminator doesn’t seem to help
Has any one tried this or know how I might mitigate this issue?
You should first try Effect > Normalize with only the Remove DC selected to the whole show before you start cutting. It doesn’t work after.
If that doesn’t do it, you may need to be more careful how you match up the waves at the cut point. Zoom all the way into your cut point and make sure the waves are going the same direction…
The top one is a bad edit and may click or pop. The bottom one is perfect. A straight vertical line is not natural no matter now high it is. That will almost always create a problem.
I find that the “click/pop” is often an inevitability of this kind of repair work. A solution that sometimes works for me is as follows:
select your “patch” piece and duplicate it out to a second track (Edit…Duplicate - Ctrl+D)
Timeshift this clip to lie alongside the “bad piece”
use the Envelope tool to aggressively fade out and fade in the original track around the “bad piece”, setting the fade points to fall just inside the ends of the patch on the timeline
apply very short fade in/fade out to each end of the patch
You may need some trial and error to get an acceptable result. As an alternative to the envelope tool you could carefully select a slightly shorter section of the bad piece, leaving a little overlap with the patch at each end and then Edit…Remove Audio…Split Delete (Ctrl+Alt+K)
Do you understand why you are getting the “click/pop”? For the benefit of others reading this topic, here’s the answer. Each edge of your cut out piece (the “patch” as I called it above) will have a non-zero waveform. Unless the waveform in the original at the point immediately prior to the patch, after the patch is fitted, has an identical waveform you will get a click/pop. The secret of “silent” digital cut & splice is to cut at zero if at all possible. By this we mean, find a point where the waveform crosses the 0 axis and cut here. At the crossing point there is no sound recorded, so there will be no sound heard. When patching you have that challenge - doubled!. You must find a pair of zero crossing points for your patch that match exactly with a pair of zero crossing points in the original where you intend to apply the patch. What’s the likelihood of that happening in a piece of music? ZERO!!! Hence the need to apply the tiny fades at each end of the patch to try and smooth over the joins.
Great suggestions! Thanks! I was thinking along the lines you indicated but I just started doing this and am not familiar with the many techniques yet.
PGA, or someone familiar with it, can you explain the “Tiny fades” thing. Are you refereing to a very short time fade or a small amplitude fade? Is there a way to control how low (or loud) the "fade out/in functions will go?
By tiny fades I meant short duration (no more than 0.5 secs and sometimes as short as 0.1 secs will do the trick). The two Effects in Audacity (Fade In and Fade Out) are both linear.