I’m working with tracks created by voice actors for the game I’m making, and I need to trim them to have as little silence at the beginning and end as possible. The tracks have been delivered to me as WAVs. Some of the tracks I export to WAV end up with an audible pop at the end. And I can’t make it go away.
I cut at zero crossing (used “Z” to make sure if it), I’ve silenced the split second of silence preceding and following the recording, I’ve normalized them, and removed DC offset (even though there was none), I cleared metadata even. All to no avail.
Another possibility is that it isn’t the file at all, but just your sound card “switching off” when it stops playing at the end of the file. If this is the case, you would expect it to happen with all files, not just WAV files.
I’ll have to look into the second possibility, the sound card switching off and making the pop.
Since I have about a 20th of a second at the end of the track that is complete silence (i.e. no waveform), I would not expect that would make for two separate zero crossings across two tracks, also I cannot see them when I’m zoomed in all the way…
When I reimport the exported file into audacity, there are no artifacts at the tail end of the track, where the pop should be.
I’ll try playing this on a different device, and will report back with findings.
So I sent the file to my phone, and when I play it back there, there’s no pop at the end. Guess Option 2 was the answer.
That’s annoying though, that I can’t verify that my exports are pop-free on the laptop I’m using to make the edits. Nothing to be done about that though.
A little “trick” to work around the problem if it happens in Audacity:
Add a label beyond the end of the track. That allows you to play past the end of the audio track, so you just need to listen to ensure there is no click at the end of the audio.