I am recording from my old 45 RPM vinyl records. Certainly they have some scratches and I do expect a little bit of noise. Is there anyway to remove the clicking or scratching noises? I’ve tried a couple of the procedures and have had no luck.
Please do not double-post. Thank you.
The two posts are different. One is talking about the audacity program on the computer. The other is talking about the physical scratches on the vinyl. Looks like you posted twice also.
For your other question - You can’t repair damaged vinyl. If there is dust or dirt that can be cleaned before it causes further damage. You can search the Internet for that but the thing that worked best for me in the vinyl days was Discofilm.
I have to log-off for a few minutes, then I’ll be back…
P.S.
Discofilm is like a thick liquid or a gel and there’s sponge dispenser built-in. It dries to something like thick Jell-O that you peel-off. You can find some similar products.
And back in the vinyl days, everybody had a Discwasher for everyday cleaning.
There are two types of vinyl noise: crackle, and ticks & pops.
Crackle is the continuous scratching noise. There’s very little you can do about that.
For the ticks and pops, you can try the Repair effect.
I’m back…
There is also a Click Removal or you can zoom-in and us the Drawing Tool to manually re-draw the waveform.
…I have a couple of special purpose vinyl clean-up tools but they are for Windows. 
This website has a few software suggestions (I assume some run on a Mac) and tons of other information about digitizing vinyl.
In Audacity you can also try the Click Removal or Repair effects for louder, isolated clicks. They usually work best if you select small sections with individual pops instead of processing the whole track at once.
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Thanks for the reply Doug!
Thanks for the reply Bill!
Thanks Again
Thanks Levi
You can’t remove scratches from the vinyl records, so is scratch noise. The only thing you can remove is dirt from the record.
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My usual process after I have extracted an individual track is first to “top and tail” it to remove any lead in and lead out noise or over-long silence. Then I visually check the entire track to find the clicks etc. These are easy to spot and quite often coincide with one revolution of the disk and repeat a few times. I then individually zoom in to each until I can see the out of shape wave form. At 192KHz sampling rate these can usually be removed by simple deletion of a few samples without significantly affecting the recording although I generally try to match instantaneous levels to leave a smooth “join”. This can be hard work but the reward is relaxed listening for many years.
Really old recordings have to be accepted as limited in quality but can still be enjoyable to my ears. ( For example Stanley Brothers, Bix Beiderbecke etc. ) You could filter these but I would rather keep the lively original sound.
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As mentioned, the first step is a thorough cleaning. Many of the clicks and pops are just dirt built up over the years. The method outlined in this document, Precision Aqueous Cleaning of Vinyl Records , works very well though it requires an investment in time and effort. Make sure the turntable stylus is clean, also. My preferred method is to lower the stylus into melamine foam (“magic eraser”) without any liquid.
From there, I’ve not found any automated declicker that actually removes clicks without leaving other artifacts. I take the slow, manual way: listen, isolate the click, remove using the “repair” function. I’ve never understood why there’s not a better solution: clicks are painfully obvious when viewed in Audacity using a combination of spectral and waveform view. There’s an add-in called “de-clicker” that I also use, but only on quiet lead-outs of tracks, and only with significantly tweaked settings.
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Like others here “I take the slow, manual way“ in removing clicks from scratches.
I created a small macro:
which I assigned a convenient keyboard shortcut, e.g. CTRL+< is nicely close on a German Windows keybd.
So I usually listen, stop, zoom in until I see the “outlier” in the waveform, sometimes down to the sample level. Then mark a range acound the click-area and press CTRL+<.
This “repairs” the click and marks the range with an (unnamed) label. This is mainly for me to remember which parts of the track I already scanned and repaired. Being fairly picky (and you hear more clicks the longer you train your ears) I had cases with hundreds of edits on a 3min track. Absurd, I know, but sometimes you you just do things because you can - not because they are useful 
I am always impressed how the human ear can recognize a single sample outlier, standing out just a few percent of the surrounding samples. And even more: By now I can tell scratches on a 70s vinyl apart from the scratches of the original 1920s recording, which was issued on this vinyl. Quite frequently the “recent” cracks are either more on the left or right channel, and the “old” cracks are mono (= on both).
I also created an elaborate Nyquist plug-in many years ago (with invaluable help from @steve) which helps in splitting the recording of a complete vinyl into individual tracks. This automates: Fade-out of previous track, fade-in of next track, adding silent lead-in time before next track, set label at begin of lead-in to next track. I always wanted to share this plug-in with the community, but somehow it never happened. Maybe I will get around to doing it this time.Will add a link here when done.
just uploaded the mentioned plug-in here: Split vinyl/tape recordings into tracks, with defined fades and gaps
Samse26, how do I add the above macro into Audacity?
Go to Tools → Macro Manager, Add a new one the the left column by gining it a name, then highlight it and edit it in the right column. Pick the desired commands from the list.
But I just realized I could have pasted the code in here, because you can also export and import macros:
Repair:Use_Preset=“”
AddLabel:
SelectTracks:Mode=“Set” Track=“0” TrackCount=“1”
Put this into the file “repair and set label.txt” and then import in the Macro manager. The file name wil be the macro name - you may want to change it.
Have fun 