Making Cut/paste edits in my audio creates artificial clicks

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Okay I have been having this issue with clicks and pops appearing after I make cut/paste edits in my voiceovers. I can only see the clicks in spectrogram form, and they show up as thin blue spikes.

When I paste clean room tone into my recording to cover up noisy areas, little blue spikes will appear out of nowhere right on the edges of my edit, making pop/click noises. This has happened with a variety of recordings using a variety of clean copies of room tone. The weirdest thing is that if you delete the thin blue spikes of click noise on the spectrogram, it sometimes just creates another one endlessly, like a whack a mole.

Anyone have any advice on this phenomenon? Is it a result of some form of constructive interference? I just want to be able to paste clean room tone or delete sections of audio without having it create artificial pops.

2

This sort of thing ? …

A short (~10ms) crossfade is required to avoid a click.

3

Yes that is one example of the spikes that occur. Sometimes they are smaller or larger and sometimes right in the middle of good room tone as opposed to so close to a normal sound wave as in the pic. But yes.

4

Sometimes you get lucky:
by-chance the waveforms are at similar values and the click at the join is not obvious,
but most of the time they will not match and there will be a click.

Crossfade is the cure.