Audible Click at Beginning of Every New Track

[jmshel]

Recorded and edited LP. Labeled each song and used "Export>Multiple" per tutorial to break into multiple WAV files. Every new WAV file has an audible click at the very beginning of the track - this click is not audible in the edited original. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Thank you.

[kozikowski]

Your capture equipment may be in trouble. You can get a condition like that if your digitizer is adding a DC level to the sound. The baseline, the center point of the blue waves is not in the middle. You won't notice any significant problem until you export segments, or try to mix with other normal music. Any transition will pop.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/DCOffset.jpg

You can use Effect > Normalize > Remove DC on the music before you export. That should clear up the popping. Your digitizer is not supposed to do that in the first place. I have a simple, cheap microphone digitizer that is broken this way. I bought two. One delivers damage like this and the other doesn't.

This may not be the problem, but it sure sounds like it.

Koz

[jmshel]

I ran the Effect>Normalize with "Remove DC offset" and "Normalize maximum amplitude to:" checked during the original edit. I ran it again just now with just "Remove DC offset" checked and it the click was gone. You were exactly right - thank you! (I'll experiment with the settings in normalize to see if checking "normalize maximum..." caused the problem or that I should just always run it after all editing is done and just before exporting from now on).

[kozikowski]

I would not use the older "Normalize" for processing your tracks. Use Amplify for level setting and Normalize only for the DC tools. The newer Normalize has selectors for linking left and right tracks, Link them, and then you won't need Amplify.

Koz

[waxcylinder]

By "older" Koz means Audacity 1.3.13 and all ealier Audacity versions.

Normalize was changed (for the better) in the recent 1.3.14 release - see the documentation for the latest version: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Normalize

WC