(For those who don’t know, this is exactly 1 revolution of a 33 1/3 RPM LP)
I’m doing repair of scratches on a bunch of old LPs.
Audacity does a beautiful job of repairing clicks!
If I fix a scratch in one place though, it would be nice to jump forward exactly 1.8 seconds.
(Sometimes they are not that easy to find by watching the waveform.)
Now, the only solution I have found so far is to type 18 in the “Length of Selection”, then menu View/Skip To/Selection End.
But it’s a lot of clicks and typing, with high potential for me to make a mistake. Frustrating.
(And there are a heck of a lot of 1.8 second intervals in an LP).
I tried to create a hotkey for the View/Skip To/Selection End but the cursor is stuck on the “Length of Selection” counter, and only clicking elsewhere can I get it out of there - Tab won’t work. This clicking elsewhere unfortunately kills the “selection” operation, and I’m back where I started. Worse off than when I started in fact, because the cursor moves to wherever I clicked.
Would it be possible to create a macro? Can someone provide some guidance?
The desperation method might be to create a click track or metronome with tick spacing of 1.8 seconds. Start it on one of the scratches. It won’t track forever, but I bet it stays reasonably accurate for you to find each tick neighborhood very quickly.
Use the time shift tool (two sideways black arrows) to shift the ticks sideways to line up the first scratch. We are, of course, assuming the scratchs are perfectly middle out.
MUTE the metronome track while you’re actually doing the editing.
There are two commands. The first is Select, the paraeters (Edit) are detailed in the Select (parameter) box on the left - It creates a 1.8 second selection relative to where we are. The second command is Cursor to Selection End - it moves the cursor to the end of the selection. You will, of course, need to set up a hotkey to fire off the macro.
As I indicated before, I suspect you’ll find Koz’s solution easier to setup and easier to use.
I suspect you’re not going to be able to swoop from one click to the next as slick as you think.
I only ever use three zoom tools and one scroll. There’s pages of tools and I suspect if you get really good at it, you might use more, but this works for me.
Command+E Zoom into a selection.
Command+3 Zoom out a little bit.
Command+F Zoom Out Full.
Those three are part of much longer lists of tools.
Add Shift+Mouse or Shift+Pad to scroll smoothly left to right (sooner and later).
Set up the metronome, drag-select and zoom into the first scratch. Fix it. Zoom out a little and scroll forward until you see the second metronome tick coming. Repeat.
There’s no shortage of vinyl tools. Are you sure you weren’t able to get them to work automatically? Vinyl scratches aren’t bashful. They announce themselves clearly and some of our pre-baked tools do a remarkable job.
There’s one caution. Prepare your vinyl master dubs in WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit. NOT MP3. You can edit perfect quality WAV files and make them into anything else. MP3 files are tiny and super convenient, but they have built-in sound damage and distortion and it gets worse as you dub or edit them.
You can make an MP3 to take with you on a hike or in the gym, but don’t try editing them later.
Scratches often show up in the track spectrogram view as vertical lines. (see: Spectrogram View - Audacity Manual)
Adjusting the spectrogram settings as shown below can help.
If you are using the “Repair” effect (which has a maximum length of 128 samples) and your sample rate is 44100:
128 samples at 44100 samples per second = (about) 0.0029
There are better (and much quicker) tools for repairing vinyl clicks
When I was converting my vinyl I started out like you with manual repairs - they took a long time.
Then Koz steered to a piece of software called ClickRepair (developed by an Australian mathematician called Vrian Davies who was also converting LPs and decided to write apps for the repair jobs).
It costs a little (you do get a 14-day free trial) but it produces almost magical results.
