Tweet
When in doubt, read the book... Yeah, sure!
I've been using Cool Edit Pro 2 for many years and FINALLY figured out what they were talking about in the help file on manual noise reduction:
"To speed up the repairing of single clicks, configure the F3key to correct them when they are highlighted by first choosing the Click/Pop filter and pressing Fill Single Click Now. The F3 key then repeats the last action without bringing up the dialog box. You can also create a quick key in the Favorites menu for filling in single clicks. [Yeah, I know that but maybe other people don't.]
"Use the Spectral View feature with the spectral resolution set to 256 bands and a Window Width of 40% to see the clicks in a waveform. See the Spectral Display area of Options > Settings > Display to adjust these parameters. Clicks will ordinarily be visible as bright vertical bars that go all the way from the top to the bottom of the display."
I've always just used the Waveform View, which looks like an EKG, showing peaks and valleys corresponding to the total energy in the sound wave. The big clicks are easy to find and remove manually, but it is the smaller ones that can be very time-consuming to remove (I had learned how to recognize their various signatures in the Waveform view, but some could be very elusive).
But by switching over to the Spectral View, those small and elusive clicks show up very clearly- you should listen to them to make sure that they are not just a drum hit. (Actually if it is on the beat, I don't care if it is a drum or a click- I leave it in!
) The one drawback with the Spectral View is that it can take a second or two for the program to redraw the screen when you zoom in or out, or move to a different spot in the track (with Waveform view this would be almost instantaneous).
Backtracking a bit, there are plug-ins which will automatically try to remove pops and clicks from your tracks, but they never seem to catch ALL of the pops, and if set too high they can have an effect on the overall sound of the track (like making it muffled by removing much of the dynamics). IMO you can get much better results by using the "Fill Single Click Now" button in Cool Edit Pro to manually remove the pops and clicks, one at a time. I have a theory on editing sound files: I figure that if you are working on a selection .001 to .003 seconds long, you can remove the clicks without changing the overall sound of the track... that would be like the 5 second rule when dropping candy on the floor. LOL
For older tracks that are really noisy (like old 78's) there might be 30,000 pops and clicks in a 3 minute song so you probably don't want to clean it up manually. I had been using the Click and Crackle Removal Tool from Sonic Foundry, but noticed that it can change the overall length of the selection, which can cause all sorts of problems. The plug-in included with Cool Edit Pro works very well, but there are a LOT of settings that you can change and the processing can be very time consuming.
One program that works well is Diamond Cut DC6- they sell a higher end version of the program to police departments for doing foresics on tape recordings. It does cost about $160 on-line but there is a less expensive version called DC Millenium for about $60 (I started off with that and then upgraded to DC6 for an additional $99). I think that the DC products work better than the Cool Edit Pro plug-ins for continuous noise (like tape hiss on old recordings)- they will remove a lot of that noise without adding a "phasey" sound to the track.
Well, time to go back to the salt mines!
Steve Ahola
I've been using Cool Edit Pro 2 for many years and FINALLY figured out what they were talking about in the help file on manual noise reduction:
"To speed up the repairing of single clicks, configure the F3key to correct them when they are highlighted by first choosing the Click/Pop filter and pressing Fill Single Click Now. The F3 key then repeats the last action without bringing up the dialog box. You can also create a quick key in the Favorites menu for filling in single clicks. [Yeah, I know that but maybe other people don't.]
"Use the Spectral View feature with the spectral resolution set to 256 bands and a Window Width of 40% to see the clicks in a waveform. See the Spectral Display area of Options > Settings > Display to adjust these parameters. Clicks will ordinarily be visible as bright vertical bars that go all the way from the top to the bottom of the display."
I've always just used the Waveform View, which looks like an EKG, showing peaks and valleys corresponding to the total energy in the sound wave. The big clicks are easy to find and remove manually, but it is the smaller ones that can be very time-consuming to remove (I had learned how to recognize their various signatures in the Waveform view, but some could be very elusive).
But by switching over to the Spectral View, those small and elusive clicks show up very clearly- you should listen to them to make sure that they are not just a drum hit. (Actually if it is on the beat, I don't care if it is a drum or a click- I leave it in!
) The one drawback with the Spectral View is that it can take a second or two for the program to redraw the screen when you zoom in or out, or move to a different spot in the track (with Waveform view this would be almost instantaneous).Backtracking a bit, there are plug-ins which will automatically try to remove pops and clicks from your tracks, but they never seem to catch ALL of the pops, and if set too high they can have an effect on the overall sound of the track (like making it muffled by removing much of the dynamics). IMO you can get much better results by using the "Fill Single Click Now" button in Cool Edit Pro to manually remove the pops and clicks, one at a time. I have a theory on editing sound files: I figure that if you are working on a selection .001 to .003 seconds long, you can remove the clicks without changing the overall sound of the track... that would be like the 5 second rule when dropping candy on the floor. LOL
For older tracks that are really noisy (like old 78's) there might be 30,000 pops and clicks in a 3 minute song so you probably don't want to clean it up manually. I had been using the Click and Crackle Removal Tool from Sonic Foundry, but noticed that it can change the overall length of the selection, which can cause all sorts of problems. The plug-in included with Cool Edit Pro works very well, but there are a LOT of settings that you can change and the processing can be very time consuming.
One program that works well is Diamond Cut DC6- they sell a higher end version of the program to police departments for doing foresics on tape recordings. It does cost about $160 on-line but there is a less expensive version called DC Millenium for about $60 (I started off with that and then upgraded to DC6 for an additional $99). I think that the DC products work better than the Cool Edit Pro plug-ins for continuous noise (like tape hiss on old recordings)- they will remove a lot of that noise without adding a "phasey" sound to the track.
Well, time to go back to the salt mines!
Steve Ahola
And that with it only having 4 of the 5 songs that were released on the the 2 LP set...
Comment