Audacity does not make Spitfish, but it does work with Audacity. Have you tried reading the Fish Fillets Manual?
The SPITFISH detects ‘essing’ by being tuned to the most badly sounding region. To find out about where this is, press the ‘listen’ button. You will probably hear… nothing. This is okay, since you are listening to the signal in the same way the control circuit would get it.
In order to hear anything, you have to increase the ‘sense’ level until there is anything to sense at all.
The reason why you have to adjust something here is that you need to tell the device what’s the most prominent level at where ‘essing’ is most likely to occur. Turning the ‘sense’ knob fully up means maximum sensitivity. You can compare this to a very low threshold on a classical compressor, though it’s not quite the same.Typically, you should adjust the level in a way that normal sounds don’t let the meter instrument light up while ‘s’-like sounds trigger it as far as possible.
To achieve such maximum difference, unpress the ‘soft’ button. Now the unit is running in some sort of ‘hyperactive’ mode. Now, the actual amount of de-essing can be adjusted via the ‘depth’ knob. This controls the level of a band-cut filter tuned at the center frequency of where you set the detector at. Whenever SPITFISH is behaving that sensitive as described above, you only need to dial in a small amount of ‘depth’ in order to achieve serious de-essing.
If it sounds too drastic, try using the ‘soft’ mode. This switch adjust the internal time constants to a slower behaviour and feeds the detector with a softer transition curve that rules over ‘no’ signal and ‘fully essing’.
Have you tried sleepytimedsp.com instead?
Gale