Hi folks,
Working on getting rid of mouth clicks in recordings.
Saw a tutorial about using the pencil/draw tool to “redraw” a waveform so it looks mostly flat during the click segment. I’ve been trying this, but it only works a small percentage of the time. Usually when I playback the newly redrawn region, the natural mouth click sound has been replaced with a digital-sounding click. This is sometimes even louder and/or more noticeable than the original click.
I haven’t found anything else on this topic-- which makes me think that maybe I’m just missing something totally obvious.
Hoping I can remedy this issue, because otherwise this draw tool seems like it does more harm than good.
Any feedback appreciated!
(I have: Windows 7, Audacity 2.0.3, downloaded .exe file.)
Some users have reported great success with using the pencil for removing small clicks, but personally, like you, I find it to be more trouble than it is worth. Perhaps we don’t have the patience or hand/eye coordination necessary to make it work reliably.
Alternatives that can be used are:
Hold down the Alt key before and during use of the pencil tool and the pencil turns into a “brush” or “spray can”. Then click in the middle of the click a few times to smooth out the click.
Zoom-in to where you can see the indivdual samples. Then, draw the waveform as “smoothly” as possible, avoiding sharp corners. (A digitized waveform is never perfectly smooth until it comes-out of your digital-to-analog converter.)
Often it’s difficult to see or “find” the click, or you might see and fix one click, and have another nearby click hidden in the waveform.
Take a look at the waveforms on [u]this page[/u]. A sine wave is a pure single-tone. A single pulse (labeled “trigger”) will sound like a “click”. (Your real-world “click” won’t look like that, and it may be mixed with aother sounds, but it will have some similar characteristics.)
If you want to see what a pure sine wave looks like (and sounds like) in Audacity, you can generate one with Generate → Tone.
Also, be aware of frequency. Clicks contain lots of high-frequency information. The default Generate → Tone → Sine is 440Hz, which is a “middle frequency”. When you are zoomed-in, you can get an idea of frequency by looking at the number of samples in the waveform. At 440Hz and a sample-rate of 44.1kHz, there are about 100 samples per cycle (50 samples per half-cycle).
Just as an experiment, you might try generating a sine wave, drawing-in some clicks/defects, and then re-drawing/repairing the waveform.
Of course, the best solution is to avoid clicks in the first place!
