Removing everything that's clipped?

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Greetings, all :slight_smile:

I’m trying to doctor up some audio from a concert I took videos of last night. I used my iPhone 4, which is mind-blowing at clearly recording loud audio, as far as non-professional cameras go. But a couple of times I accidentally had my hand on the damned microphone, muffling and distorting the audio :slight_smile: I’ve actually managed to do a decent job of un-muffling it with EQs, and brought the volume up quite a bit…it’s sounding pretty decent except that there are a lot of pops I’d like to remove. The “click removal” tool isn’t doing me any good at all. It seems that there is almost a perfect correlation between the popping, and where the audio is clipped. I’m wondering if there’s any way I can apply a complete silencing to exactly the parts of audio that are clipped. For example, some plugin that would look at every single sample, and if it’s past the maximum level, replace it with complete silence. It seems to me like it should be reasonably simple, but I’ve Googled around and can’t find a way. Can anyone help me? TIA!

PS “ClipFix” isn’t doing me any good. It reduces the volume of the clipped audio but doesn’t destroy it completely, so the pops are still there.

2

I don’t think so. One problem with an Auto Sensor would be knowing when to stop. Popping waves are part of other waves before and after the pop. If all you do is suppress a wave that goes all the way up to overload and leave the bits before and after that are about the same size as the average music, then you’ll substitute two clicks for one big pop. If you take everything out, you may seriously damage the music.

You can experiment with selecting a pop manually and Control-L Make Silent.

That’s why nobody pays any attention to you recording a concert. Chances of you coming away with a good product are very small. It’s very difficult to do.

Koz

3

Well most of it sounds great…the only parts that pop are when I was rubbing my finger all over the microphone :stuck_out_tongue: thanks for the reply though. :slight_smile:

4

Forum member Steve made a plugin called popmute which is like an inverted noise gate: when the signal goes above a threshold, (not below like a regular gate), it can be squelched to silence, it may be worth a try, see … https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/new-plug-in-effect-popmute/17499/1

5

Another possible alternative would be to apply a “patch” over the click using audio from immediately before or after the click. This is a bit tricky to do manually, but there is a plug-in available that can make it quick and easy: EZ-Patch