I need help getting rid of some crackling popping sounds I found in my audio

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

My Friend and I do a podcast and this is an excerpt from the episode I was editing for this week. When we were doing our mic checks and stuff I didn’t hear any of the pops or crackles, but once we’d finished recording I could hear them clear as day. Do you guys know where they’re coming from? Is there a way to remove them? Thanks so much for your help, we’re super new to this and are just now trying to learn everything. I understand if they can’t be fixed but at the least would be happy to know how to avoid this in future! Thanks again!
https://soundcloud.com/joshcastrokif/pops-and-crackles-example

2

My setup:
Mic: Neat Worker Bee
Xlr cable: Neat bee line quad conductor
Interface: Focusrite scarlett solo
Computer: vivo book 14

3

Unfortunately clicks and skips are a common curse of recording with computers. There’s many things that can cause it.

The first thing is to work out if the clicks are in the actual recording, or just on playback. If they are in the recording then they will appear in exactly the same place every time you listen.

There’s some trouble-shooting information here: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#skips

4

From my listening it seems that the pops, skips, and crackles are consistent. That would mean that I was taxing my PC too much while recording–which makes sense since we generally need to video call whenever we record. I can definitely change at least the buffer length in the future to avoid this and close as much as I can–but is there anything I can do to repair this audio that’s already been effected?

I understand that it might be too far gone at this point–but do you know of a way I could improve it even a little bit?

Thanks so much for that link, that explained a lot of what was going on!

5

Have you tried Updated De-Clicker and new De-esser for speech

I hope this helps. :smiley:

6

There are dropouts: so it’s a jigsaw with (tiny) pieces missing, so a seamless repair isn’t possible …

7

oof. Thanks so much for doing that! If it was laborious to do 3 seconds worth I don’t want to even try on 2 hours worth. Thanks so much! I’ll make sure to be more rigorous during mic checks in the future.

8

If you’re recording on Audacity, in future you could try giving Audacity higher CPU priority, so less likely to be interrupted by other processes running on the computer.
( I would have a separate dedicated audio-recorder device as a back-up ).