Remove Clicks and Scratches

Audacity offers a couple of fast ways to clean up a scratchy recording of a vinyl LP. Digital recordings can also pick up clicks from various sources. The first of these is Click Removal: It’s not as reliable as manually correcting scratches, but it’s fast and pretty good.

Click Removal

The Click Removal effect (Figure 12-4) looks for spikes in the waveform that are typical of pops caused by scratches, deletes the scratch, and then does a bit of interpolation to reconstruct the waveform. The Select Threshold setting determines the sensitivity for deciding when a spike is a scratch; it uses an algorithm that compares the audio on both sides of the spike to figure out what part is the scratch and what part is the good audio. ...

Get The Book of Audacity now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.