Suggestions for "repair" workflow

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I’m digitizing some old vinyl records right now. The “repair” effect is great to get rid of the most annoying clicks. But it requires a lot of zooming in and out: Listen to the audio while zoomed out, so you can locate clicks, then zoom in a few times until you can make a small enough selection, then apply the repair effect, then zoom out a few times again for the overview and start looking for the next click. I’ve looked at the wiki and the forum, and there seems no way to speed that workflow up. Using the mouse scrollwheel with Ctrl and Shift is the fastest way to do it right now.

I have come up with a few ideas, please tell me what you think of them:

Zoom presets
This would be the simplest change to implement, I believe. For my problem, I would need only 2 fixed zoom values: a close-up and an overview. It would be great if there were keyboard shortcuts to switch from one to the other (maybe Ctrl+4 and Ctrl+5? Or just one shortcut to cycle through the presets?). Even better if you could set your own preferred 2 zoom values.
I see there is a suggestion in http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Feature_Requests for “Edit Toolbar: Zoom presets”. I wouldn’t mind a button in a toolbar, but the keyboard is often faster.

Second View
More complicated, but more powerful: Allow a second view of the current waveform which can be set to another zoom level. Both views are always synchronous, but one could be an overview, and the other a close-up. You can make selections and edit in both views. It would be much quicker than zooming in one view: just click the overview to position your zoomed view, then make a selection in that zoomed view, do “repair”, and jump to the next click via the overview.
If you could open a second view, maybe you could have a third one, too? It could be useful to have a spectrogram visible at the same time as the waveform.
This is probably what the “Multiple track views” Feature Request in the wiki is about (but it does not mention independent zoom values).

“Repair Brush”
When you click with this tool, it automatically runs “repair” over the 128 samples (-64/+64) where you clicked. No need to zoom in, but of course your clicks will be more accurate when zoomed in. There could be an option for the “brush size” if you want less than 128 samples selected. This would be a narrow solution for just this problem. Zoom presets or multiple views would be useful for other things, too.
“Bind particular parameters of effects to buttons or keyboard shortcuts” is maybe the thing in the Feature Requests that comes closest to this. … ah, I just found “Suggestion: Repair Limits” on http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Pending_Feature_Requests. Steve has the same idea there!

So, what do you think?
Would you use any of these things?

fritz

2

There are some specialized applications for cleaning-up vinyl. I use [u]Wave Repair[/u] ($30 USD). It does an amazing job on most vinyl defects (with a few different repair methods). But like Aucacity, in the manual mode you still have to find and zoom-in on the defects. So, it usually takes me a full weekend to fix-up an LP. Wave Repair (Like Audacity) has a spectral view that makes it easier to “find” the defects, and there is an option to temporarily skip-over and “play around” the selection which also helps to confirm you’ve got the right spot.

There are some more-automated applications, and [u]This page[/u] (written by the developer of Wave Repair) has some software suggestions.

3

My personal app of choice for this is Brian Davies’ ClickRepair - it costs around $40 but I think it is well worth it if you have more than a few LPs to convert.

Like you I started out manually fixing clicks with the Repair effect but that was tedious and very time consuming. A steer from fellow forum elf, Koz, led me to ClickRepair which I found to produce excellent results. I do run it on auto-pilot but manual is also available (but unnecessary imo) and I did soften slightly Brian’s default settings.

See this sticky thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/click-pop-removal-clickrepair-software/1933/1

WC

4

Thank you both for the links to specialized software. I might try out both. I don’t have a huge number of records, and most of them are in good condition, so I might be fine with Audacity on its own. That said, the raves for ClickRepair are convincing :slight_smile:

Does one of you have an account for the wiki? If so, could you please add my votes to the Feature Request list for the “Zoom presets”, “Multiple Track Views” and if possible for the “Repair Limits” idea. Thanks a million!

5

Can you avoid having to keep zooming out? Perhaps you could start by adding a label at every click position while zoomed out, then zoom in to the first one and use Tab to jump to the next label when you’re finished with the first.

6

Done.

WC