Needledrop annoyances

[slartibartfast]

There can't be many things more annoying than painstakingly removing all the pops and clicks in a needledrop only to hear clearly audible pops that you missed the first time you play it back via Squeezebox. These pops that escape detection tend to be very difficult to distinguish from the music waveform so it is no surprise that automated processes miss them. I am now on my fifth iteration of "Wind & Wuthering" and I still hear a few annoying pops I will need to track down and obliterate. They are more obvious on the living room system than through headphones on the laptop. I finally resorted to monitoring through my USB audio interface which helps. Hopefully the next iteration will catch them all 🤞

[Apesbrain]

Yeah, it happens. I keep a pencil and paper nearby so I can jot down the track # and time if I think I hear a pop. SB actually makes it easy to jump back 15 sec. to confirm if it really was a pop vs. a static tic. Fixing it rarely takes more than a few minutes, so no biggie.

[slartibartfast]

Yeah, it happens. I keep a pencil and paper nearby so I can jot down the track # and time if I think I hear a pop. SB actually makes it easy to jump back 15 sec. to confirm if it really was a pop vs. a static tic. Fixing it rarely takes more than a few minutes, so no biggie.

Sometimes it is very hard to tell the pop from the music. You have the latency of the soundcard to deal with as well so the cursor position doesn't match the click position. I have also heard some noises I thought were clicks but also appear on the CD version 🤣

[d6jg]

Sometimes it is very hard to tell the pop from the music. You have the latency of the soundcard to deal with as well so the cursor position doesn't match the click position. I have also heard some noises I thought were clicks but also appear on the CD version 🤣

I don't experience that problem with VinylStudio. If you zoom in far enough you can usually see the pop quite clearly.

[slartibartfast]

I agree you can normally spot the pop easily but what about these examples?

[d6jg]

That's Audacity though and it doesn't zoom in enough

[slartibartfast]

That's Audacity though and it doesn't zoom in enough

Well it's Wave Corrector. How much do want to zoom in? I can zoom in further but zooming in any further wouldn't make the pop more obvious.

[Apesbrain]

I have also heard some noises I thought were clicks but also appear on the CD version 🤣

I have also come across this. If I find it annoying enough, I remove it anyway.

In your example, I'm going to suspect any areas where one channel trace is significantly different from the other. For example, here:

[slartibartfast]

I have also come across this. If I find it annoying enough, I remove it anyway.

In your example, I'm going to suspect any areas where one channel trace is significantly different from the other. For example, here:

Got it in one 😀. Sometimes if all attempts at correcting the waveform fail I nuke it with a short "cut and splice" which is surprisingly inaudible.

[cliveb]

Automatic click/pop removal is notoriously difficult and often unreliable.
IME Wave Corrector is one of the better ones (along with VinylStudio, Adobe Audition and Sony Sound Forge).

But auto removal is always going to miss some instances - in which case you have to resort to manual editing.
Worse still, auto-declickers sometimes make a hash of things. Stuff like reed instruments can trick them and get trashed.
At least Wave Corrector allows you to review its findings and remove phantom positives.
Also, some big pops tend to be replaced with dull "thuds" - it's always a good idea to do a quick manual pass to fix really big pops before letting an auto-declicker loose.

As for finding elusive small clicks, I agree that some seemingly innocuous-looking pimples on the side of a big waveform can result in audible ticks.
Trying to identify them on a waveform display is difficult.
You're much better off using a spectral display, where clicks (and even small ticks) tend to stick out quite obviously as narrow spikes, like this:

[slartibartfast]

I don't experience that problem with VinylStudio. If you zoom in far enough you can usually see the pop quite clearly.

I just tried Vinyl studio on my problem track and the automatic method failed to find the pops. Do you want to try it?

[slartibartfast]

Automatic click/pop removal is notoriously difficult and often unreliable.
IME Wave Corrector is one of the better ones (along with VinylStudio, Adobe Audition and Sony Sound Forge).

But auto removal is always going to miss some instances - in which case you have to resort to manual editing.
Worse still, auto-declickers sometimes make a hash of things. Stuff like reed instruments can trick them and get trashed.
At least Wave Corrector allows you to review its findings and remove phantom positives.
Also, some big pops tend to be replaced with dull "thuds" - it's always a good idea to do a quick manual pass to fix really big pops before letting an auto-declicker loose.

As for finding elusive small clicks, I agree that some seemingly innocuous-looking pimples on the side of a big waveform can result in audible ticks.
Trying to identify them on a waveform display is difficult.
You're much better off using a spectral display, where clicks (and even small ticks) tend to stick out quite obviously as narrow spikes, like this:

Yes I do use the spectrogram view. In this case though I still can't identify the pops. I have no idea how this LP was treated but some of these pops are the biggest I've seen but still difficult to know how the waveform should look.
With Wave Corrector I tend to do an automatic pass with the threshold raised to 10 so only the worst clicks are detected then check each one to make sure they are clicks. After that I listen stopping at clicks to manually remove them.

[RobbH]

Automatic click/pop removal is notoriously difficult and often unreliable.
IME Wave Corrector is one of the better ones (along with VinylStudio, Adobe Audition and Sony Sound Forge)....

This is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I used to get good results with a program called Wave Repair, which I think you (@cliveb) might know something about. I haven't used it in a long time, though. How would you compare it to other current options?

[cliveb]

This is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I used to get good results with a program called Wave Repair, which I think you (@cliveb) might know something about. I haven't used it in a long time, though. How would you compare it to other current options?

Yes, I am the author of Wave Repair. It's basically a special purpose editor designed for the kind of manual edits you need when restoring recordings of vinyl records. Many general purpose editors have the facilities to achieve the same results, but Wave Repair makes those kind of edits easier to do. I originally wrote it (back in the late 1990s) because I was transferring my LPs and couldn't find an editor that did what I needed.

If you want automatic declicking, there are better options. If you want the least labour intensive way of manually restoring vinyl recordings - and IMHO careful manual restoration does give the best results - Wave Repair is worth having in your toolkit.

Note that it's an old legacy program which is no longer in active development.

[RobbH]

Trying not to hijack this thread, this is just to acknowledge to cliveb that I downloaded the current version of Wave Repair and found that it installs and runs on Linux under Wine. I haven't actually tried to use it yet, but the next time I feel a need to transfer vinyl, I will find out. My registration from 1998 was still good. I also still use Cool Edit Pro v2.1, which was later rebranded as Adobe Audition v.1.