Scanning for clicks

VinylStudio has a fast and flexible declicker which is very effective at removing clicks and pops from vinyl recordings. You can scan an entire LP side or just part of it (perhaps with different settings) and most clicks can be removed automatically in this way with no manual intervention required.

To repair a click, VinylStudio examines the waveform on either side and reconstructs the damaged section from the surrounding audio. As the following screenshot shows, the repair is a pretty good match and usually completely inaudible:

Manual Click Repairs

VinylStudio can make (in audio terms) very wide repairs - upto 400 samples or so - and can therefore completely eliminate very severe clicks, pops and scratches, but it sometimes needs a little help. The most common problem is that a very severe click or pop is only partially repaired, as the following example shows:

As you can see, the repair does not completely encompass the click and so the green (corrected) trace still has a bump in it, which is audible as a muffled 'thump'. The solution is to extend the edges of the repair slightly by dragging with the mouse, like so:

Fortunately, severe clicks like this are usually easy to spot in the waveform display so fixing them manually is npt too difficult, even if VinylStudio has missed them completely (although this is rare).

Percussion and Brass Protection

Sharp percussion sounds or a blast from a brass or reed instrument can fool programs that scan for clicks (they think it's a click and modify the audio as a result). All declicking programs suffer from this problem in varying degrees, and the result is that drumbeats, handclaps and other percussion can be dulled, and brass, sax, synth and other such 'rasping' sounds can be distorted, sometimes badly so.

To combat these problems we have developed proprietary solutions, called Percussion Protection and Brass Protection respectively, which allow you to declick your valuable recordings without damaging them. These are powerful tools for distinguishing music from clicks. For more information, follow the links. These will take you into the VinylStudio help file.

Sound Samples

If you would like to hear some sound samples, please click here.