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Click Removal - Audacity Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click...

Click Removal
From Audacity Wiki

Click Removal (under the Effect Menu) is designed to remove individual


clicks on audio tracks and is especially suited to declicking recordings made
from vinyl records, without damaging the rest of the audio. The tool works
by looking for short, abrupt discontinuities (known as "spikes") in the
waveform, typical of those produced by a click on a record. Click Removal
then interpolates the samples either side of the click to reconstruct the
waveform. However, it's common sense not to rely exclusively on digital
sound processing to clean up noisy records. Where possible, have the
records professionally cleaned, or use your own cleaning methods.

Contents
1 Click Removal
2 How it works
3 Silencing and Draw Tool
4 Other techniques
4.1 Spectrum analysis
4.2 Subtraction
4.3 Hard limiting

Click Removal
First of all, select the audio to which you want to apply Click Removal. You can select
all of a track by clicking on its Track Panel (where the mute/solo buttons are), or Edit
> Select > All or CTRL + A (CMD + A on a Mac) will always select all the audio on
screen. You can select part of a track by clicking in the track and dragging to left or
right with your mouse, or by holding down SHIFT and the left or right arrow keys.

To use Click Removal, move the "threshold" slider to adjust how sensitive the click
detection is, and the "spike width" slider to adjust the length of spiked audio to be
considered as a click. Then click the "Remove Clicks" button. Softer clicks may require
you to move the threshold slider further to left. Broader clicks may require you to
move the spike width slider further to right. Very soft and rapid light ticks that sound

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Click Removal - Audacity Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click...

like static electricity and which are typical of vinyl (even though the pressing is often
the cause rather than a static charge) won't be effectively removed with Click
Removal. For this type of noise you should select an area of the vinyl that contains
only the noise (no music or speech) and use the Noise Removal tool under the same
Effect menu - see Noise Removal.

How it works
The algorithm consists of two parts:

The first part, click detection, works by measuring the amplitude of the sound in
each small piece of the selected sound, and comparing it to the average amplitude in
surrounding pieces. Short pieces of sound that are much louder than the region
before or after might be spikes. (The threshold slider bar sets the square of the
required ratio between the amplitudes inside and outside the loud section). Pieces of
extra-loud sound that are shorter than the max spike width (measured in
milliseconds) are marked for removal. This technique works well for vinyl record pops
and clicks because it catches oscillations (not just single spikes). Electronic spikes
typically drive the speaker in just one direction, but LP pops are harder to find
because they often contain oscillation as the stylus and cartridge settle back down
after the initial hit of the dust mote, groove gouge, or whatever.

The second part of the algorithm, click removal, replaces the marked segment of
sound. This part of the algorithm is pretty simple-minded -- it just smoothly moves
the speaker from the position before the pop to the position after the pop. This has
the effect of creating a very short, hopefully not-very-noticeable gap in the track
where before there was a loud click.

Silencing and Draw Tool


Sometimes an even better result can be obtained by zooming in (CTRL + 1) to near
sample level and either silencing the click (Edit > Silence), or using the Draw Tool to
smooth out the contours of the samples and so attenuate the click. Remember, the
click will be visible as a "spike" in the waveform. Most discrete clicks up to five
milliseconds long can actually be simply silenced without leaving an audible gap in
the sound, although many spread wider that that. If the click is not suitable for
silencing, try using the Draw Tool by clicking the pencil icon top left of the Audacity
screen, or press F3 on your keyboard. The mouse cursor will change to a pencil while
over the audio track. You may need to zoom in a little further to use the tool. Simply
click in the track at the point you wish the sample to be redrawn to, and wait for the
samples to be rejoined together. Alternatively, click in the area of track where the line

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Click Removal - Audacity Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click...

of samples is not smooth and hold down ALT on your keyboard. The cursor will now
change to a brush. Each mouse click will progressively redraw the samples in the area
so as to smooth out their contour. When clicking has no further effect, the samples
are as smoothly drawn as possible.

Other techniques
Silencing highly zoomed areas or redrawing samples can get tedious even over a
relatively short stretch of audio. Here are a few other tricks you can try if Click
Removal did not help as much as you hoped.

Spectrum analysis

Analyse the area with Analyze > Plot Spectrum to see if any spikes are concentrated in
particular frequencies and then use Equalization under the Effect menu to reduce the
volume of those frequencies. You can do this more precisely with the Nyquist Notch
Filter plugin (http://www.shellworld.net/~davidsky/notch.zip) .

To install new plugins, unzip them into the Plug-Ins folder inside the Audacity
installation folder. On Windows computers, this is usually under Program Files. On
Mac OS X, it is usually under Applications. The plugins will be available after
restarting Audacity.

Subtraction

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Click Removal - Audacity Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click...

Where the clicks sound equally loud in both left and right
channels of a stereo recording (this often isn't the case),
but the music information in the channels is very different
at that point, you can try to cancel out the click by making
the affected section of track mono and inverting one of the
channels:

First, select the area of track with the click and and
hit the downward pointing arrow in the Track
Pop-Down Menu (right), then "Split Stereo Track"
followed by Edit > Split which moves the selected
area into a new track underneath your original track.

Now on the new track, use the same Track Popdown


Menu, make both tracks mono and then select one of
the channels and Effect > Invert.

When you export the result as a stereo track, the area you split out will be effectively
mono (in the sense that the previous music signal in the left and right channels will
be mixed into both channels), but the click should be sharply attenuated without
harming the music too much.

Hard limiting

Some users find the Hard Limiter an additional way of removing clicks. A Hard Limiter
is a particularly strong dynamic compressor to reduce the difference between loud
and soft in an area of audio. A Hard Limiter is included in the Audacity 1.2.6 Windows
installer under the Effect Menu, or is available in the SWH plugins suite:

Windows: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/beta/ladspa/ladspa-0.4.15.exe .
Mac: http://ardour.org/files/releases/swh-plugins-0.4.15.dmg .
Linux: http://plugin.org.uk/download.php .

The Hard Limiter controls are:

dB limit: the input signal level above which the input signal will be clipped.
Wet level: controls the amount of the clipped signal fed to the output. It thus
acts as a volume control applied after the limiter (just as if you applied the effect
and then used the Amplify effect).
Residue level: controls the amount of the clipped signal that will be mixed back
in. By default the value is set to zero and so the clipped signal is discarded. By
raising this level, some of the clipped signal will be restored, making the limit
softer and retaining more of the peaks and troughs of the original waveform.

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Click Removal - Audacity Wiki http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click...

Alternatively if you turn the residue full up and the Wet signal full down, you get
only the pieces of waveform that are above the dB limit you chose.

A new and automatic "Repair" effect for very short sections of badly damaged audio
up to 128 samples in length is included in Audacity 1.3.2 and later.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Click_Removal"

Categories: For Users | Tutorial

This page was last modified 20:25, 14 September 2008.


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