Repairs: Clicks, Clipping and Plosives

Repair tools are for the damage that got through anyway. They work best on small, short problems: a tick here, a pop there, a few clipped peaks on a laugh. They cannot save a recording that was clipped the whole way through or popped on every P. Lesson 1 is still the best repair tool you have.

Everything in this lesson lives in two places in SoundStudio: Click & Pop Removal in the Noise tab, and the Clipping group in the Tools tab.

What kind of click is it?

When you run Find Clicks, SoundStudio measures the frequency makeup of each click. That tells you where it came from. This table follows the help page's own guide:

Mouth clicks are the voice editor's daily bread. A dry mouth makes more of them. A glass of water and a slice of green apple before a session cut them down a lot (old voiceover trick, and it works).

The click workflow

1. Open the Noise tab and find Click & Pop Removal. Leave Detector on Standard and Sensitivity around 5 for speech.
2. Press Find Clicks. Nothing in the audio changes. Each click is marked in red on the waveform, and a report shows the rate, typical spacing and where they bunch up.
3. Use Next / Prev to jump to each one. Listen. Scrub across it slowly with Scrub on (press S): a real click is a sharp tick even at slow speed.
4. Real click: press Fix This Click or F. Its mark turns green. Not a click (a hard T or K that the detector flagged): press Ignore or I.
5. When the list holds only real clicks, press Remove Clicks to repair everything still listed.
6. Run Find Clicks again. It should find few or none.

The Standard detector will flag some sharp consonants. On speech, do not just press Remove Clicks blind on the whole file. Step through at least the first dozen so you learn what it is catching in this voice.

The ones the scan misses

Some ticks hide inside a noisy sound, like an S or a breath, but you can still see them as a thin line poking up above the waveform. The Spike Pen is built for those: press P to turn it on, click right on the spike, and it finds and fixes the spike within about 1.5 ms of your click. Press P again to turn it off.

For a click too ugly to rebuild, drag across it and press Delete Selection in the Click & Pop panel. The two sides are joined with a 6 ms blend. In speech that only works in a gap; cutting inside a word shortens the word.

Clipping

Clipping happens when the signal tries to go past 0 dBFS. The file can't store it, so the top of each wave is cut flat. Those flat tops add harsh new harmonics that were never in the voice: a crackle on loud words, a fuzzy edge on a laugh. The theory page explains it at Clipping and distortion.

In the Tools tab:

• Detect Clipping counts samples at full scale.
• Repair Clipping finds flat-topped peaks (3 or more samples stuck at the file's top level) and rebuilds each one from the audio around it. With a selection, it works only inside the selection. One Undo takes it all back.

Its limits are honest ones. Runs longer than 4 ms are left alone, because there is not enough real audio nearby to guess the missing shape. And if the rebuilt peaks go past full scale, the message tells you by how much; nothing is turned down for you. So after a repair, lower the level with Apply Gain (Tools tab) by that amount or a bit more, or leave it for the loudness step in lesson 7.

A clip that lasts a whole sentence is not repairable in any meaningful way. Re-record the line, and drop your input gain by 6 dB while you're at it.

Plosives

A plosive that got past your pop filter shows as a low thump at the start of a P or B: a big, slow bulge on the waveform with the consonant's small sharp burst riding on top. On the spectrogram it is a bright blob at the very bottom.

The help page's method for low thumps:

1. Zoom in on the thump. Select the whole thump, not just its sharp start. Repair Selection accepts selections from 0.1 ms to 250 ms.
2. Set Repair range to Below cutoff only, around 300 Hz.
3. Press Repair Selection.

Because only the lows are rebuilt, the crisp top of the P stays as recorded. The word still sounds like "public," without the punch in the chest.

For a lighter plosive, a simpler fix works: select just the thump and apply a Low Cut around 150 Hz with the EQ's Apply EQ to Selection. Selection edits blend 50 ms at the edges, so it does not click. Do not raise the Low Cut on the whole track to 200 Hz to kill one pop; you'll thin out every word to fix one.