remove sound of hammering (nail driving) in background

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I have an outdoor recording of a singer recently transferred from reel to reel to Audacity 2.0.3. with the .exe installer on Windows 7 Ultimate. Unfortunately, a neighbor was building a deck or something and his hammering is heard in the background. I have tried- DELETE, (de)AMPLIFY, SILENCE, AND POP MUTE (not sure I understand how to use it correctly) on every “wham” of the hammer but I am not satisfied with the end result in any of these fixes. I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks, Mike.

2

I have an outdoor recording of a singer recently transferred from reel to reel to Audacity 2.0.3. with the .exe installer on Windows 7 Ultimate.

Let me read that back to you. You have a clean recording of a singer on reel-to-reel and you transferred it to Audacity in a way that picked up hammering?

Koz

3

The hammering sound was part of the original reel to reel recording.

4

Then you’re dead. The hammer is now a performer in your show. Past going in to each one and silencing it, I don’t believe there is any other way, and that is going to leave holes in the show. I think all the click and pop removers are going to leave trash behind. The hammer isn’t a classic vinyl record pop.
Koz

5

Thank you for advising me. Yes, I had located each individual ham-er event and tried various fixes as mentioned in original post. Yes SILENCE leaves very short gaps of no sound which I may decide are preferable to the hammering (the guy took 5-6 strikes for each nail!). I wonder if I could introduce some generic noise (white, pink, brown) into those gaps at the same db as precedes them and mask the “harsh” transitions from sound to silence back to sound?

6

It would be a very time consuming process to fix each nail bang, but a reasonable repair is possible using the EZ-Patch plug-in available here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/ez-patch/22093/1

This short repair (less than 2 seconds of audio) took me about 5 minutes:

7

Thanks Steve, I utilized your (Are you Steve Daulton named in the plug in?) EZ Patch. Yes it is quick and effective. I had figured out I could copy/paste adjacent sounds to make a good fix, obviously you made the task very easy. Mike.