Removing Clicks, removing clicks from records Options

[WaterDog]

Peak by iteself may not be enough to clean up recorded LPs. Bias' SoundSoap should be - it's designed to clean up audio. Bias is also coming out with SoundSoap Pro early in 2004, which is what I am waiting for. RayGun Pro by Arboretum will also work well. I believe you can download demos of SoundSoap and RayGun.

When a click is just too much to bear, I often use Peak, zoom in on the click, and use "Repair Click" (Rather than "Repair Clicks...") The selection has to be less than 100 samples, and select on a zero crossings if possible.
But it's time consuming.

Manually drawing out the clicks and pops with the pencil tool in Peak does work, but takes forever. If you are seriously converting your LP collection to digital, it may very well be too much work.

My vote: RayGun Pro or SoundSoap now, or SoundSoap Pro when it comes out.

[editbrain]

waterdog, i agree it is very time consuming to use the pencil to manually draw out pops and clicks. i have to agree that soundsoap is good at cleaning up audio, but mainly hiss and rumble removal. if you use soundsoap to remove a pop you usually get a thump instead of a pop. not only that your at risk to making a cd quality track sound like a real media file, or you will get the every not so popular glass effect.

you know. i really am going to search out the best for the job. i feel like i have just been settling with what we have spoke about on this post. there really has to be something that is smart enought to recognize a peak spike and erase it.

[Synthetic]

I just wonder how software is supposed to automatically know if a spike is unwanted noise and not a sharp percussive attack... I am true believer that if you want some thing done good and right... you will find the manual methods most often work best even if not time efficient. This is my theory for most automated jobs such as graphics. I have used a couple previous versions of masking plugins for photoshop and none seemed to do any better than I doing it manually. So I do all my masks myself using a few tricks I learned over the years and seem to get better results.

As our newspaper found out when we sold our press to have paper printed on great big supposedly state-of-the-art billion dollar plus new press that was almost all automated... sometimes you sacrifice quality for speed and ease... our images in paper are not near as good as old press and too many ink problems and more problems

[editbrain]

Synthetic, I agree. that is why i was describing the "pencil tool".

[WaterDog]

Sadly, as I am archiving records every day, I don't really have time to use the pencil tool--although I agree it is really the best way to take out the pop and leave the rest of the audio untouched.

For software solutions, it still looks like SoundSoap Pro or RayGun Pro will be the best pro-sumer options out there. SoundSoap Pro isn't out yet, but I am downloading a demo of RayGun Pro to check out.

There is also TC Electronic's "Restoration" suite, which seems like an amazing tool--and does include pop removal in it's arsenal--but it is an $800 (soon to be $1,500) software add-on to their $1,000-$1,500 hardware audio system. Not in the budget for this year, or next.

FWIW, Peak's "Repair Clicks..." feature is designed to be tuneable to recognize the spike of a digital pop and remove it. It would ideally ignore a kick drum, clave or other sharp transient. For example, the manual says a sample value of -100 followed by a value of 10,000 is probably a click, and not part of the music. It also gives starting points for cleaning up audio. But Bias also admit that "Repair Clicks..." isn't ideal for cleaning up vinyl. Sigh.

Someone already said this, but as much as I like RayGun for some noise removal, it mostly converts clicks to "thumps,' and I get aliasing and artifacts with a lot of settings anyway. Maybe the Pro version is better, I'm a few years behind upgrading.

I also have tons of vinyl I want to archive, so am glad for the discussion.

The search continues!

[WaterDog]

...not to belabor the point, but check this....

http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/mac/AUDIO_RESTORATION/

[tromba]

I've just done about 20 records and went back to my PC to do it. I used Cool Edit (which cost (or used to) around $65) and an addon called Click Fix. Clickfix is a highly customizable click removal program as well has having many presets. I usually use gentle, normal, or aggressive depending on the condition of the record. This worked really well. What were left mostly (if anything) were some of the large clicks which i did remove by hand. The little I;ve played with the Peak demo, it looked like there were only 3 settings. The clickfix addon has many more, but more importantly for me, the presets work fine.

This works really really well. Problem is that Cool Edit is no longer available. Syntrillium was bought out by Adobe, and the expensive Cool Edit Pro version is relabelled as Adobe Audition -- still a great product, but unfortunately for PC only.

So I've lugged my old PC notebook home with my recorded albums to edit, and carried the Powerbook home to do other work!!!

Given changing all my records to CD precludes any removing of click by hand, I hope there's something out there somewhere!!

[tromba]

I just wonder how software is supposed to automatically know if a spike is unwanted noise and not a sharp percussive attack...

In the restorations I've just done, after the Clickfix does it's thing, there are often what look like clicks left. If I zoom in enough, it's easy to tell visually what's a click and what's a percussive attack -- it's the length of the sound. At a certain screen resoultion they look identical, but zooming in shows the "real" sound to get larger and larger on screen and the click staying small. What sometimes looks like a series of clicks turns out to be drum hits, and their duration is significantly longer than a click. It'd be my assumption that something like this is how the software determines which is which.