Best Declickers?

Folks,

What is the best Direct X declicker available? I heard the Sonic Foundry one (with the NR plug in) a while back that a friend had, and it worked REALLY well, except that it ate lower voiced men and similar instruments like saxes alive and really altered the sound, and removed the pick sound from a pick bass...anything out there work as well as that does when it works, but generally all the time?

 

Take a look at www.algorithmix.com
They have a pro line and a low cost line -both are at the top of their class.

 

Doing it by hand.

 

The Sonic Foundry is difficult to set...yes, it will "eat" percussive sounds quite easily. I've been using the Waves "Restoration" filters--they are far better, but are also far more expensive. The click filter takes out the usual scratches, but the crackle filter gets out very fine ticks that other filters don't. I haven't found them to alter the sound of the music that much either. As with any filter, learning how to use it is half the battle. I prefer to make two or three light passes with a filter, rather than try to clean out everything all at once. Less is more: apply a filter too heavily and you really eat into the music.

 

You are absolutly correct. In fact, there is no other way to do it without ruining the sound of the recording.

Any filter running through the entire song will strip the life right out of what little is left of the digital wav. Or it will fail to remove all the ticks.

Sometimes I spend days and weeks on albums. At the moment I am doing Van Morrison - Live at the Roxy 78 Warners promo. I am going over ever second of this 60 min album by hand removing each tick and click. While this album is in very good condition, and there is not that many clicks to remove comparably speaking, I am going over this one with more effort than usual. I have been through 4 copies of this recording form other sources, and never heard it done right. So this is the last time, and I am doing it right!

 

I've achieved exceptional results with Sonic Foundry's click and crackle removal tool. The key is tweaking the parameters to remove the offending noise without impacting the music. It can be done but requires a lot of patience (although not as much as declicking by hand - been there, done that!)

 

Among the more popular ones i've tried that will handle 24 and 32-bit files:

SONIC FOUNDRY'S NR:
It works quite nicely at moderate to heavu settings, but tends to dull the high frequencies and smear the sound a bit.

WAVES RESTORATION-X:
Same as above, but it's the ONLY one i've ever used that will effectively clean up the fine crackle. Hope you have about $1000 for it!

CLICK-FIX for Adobe Audition/Cool Edit:
It works quite well, but you can't always use strong settings without it eating up high frequency sounds like brass and singers.

The best method is doing it by hand, meaning using interpolation. But, it is tedious, and requires LOTS of time, patience, concentration, good monitoring, and a good ear.

 

IMHO you need an awfully good ear to hear the Waves click and crackle filters do anything to the music--if used properly, you only hear noise removed. Sure, crank it up and it'll clip off transients like any other filter out there. There's a reason it currently costs $1200 or more for the restoration bundle (depending on platform), and it is used a lot in the recording industry as well. Yes, there's even a version that plugs into Pro Tools. (Some well-known movies mastered for DVD were cleaned up with various Waves products.) Can't judge it until you've heard it (or not heard it). Personally I still do a few things by hand, but I'm at the comfort level where I can adjust the click and crackle filters in Waves so they don't attack the music much, if at all. Depends on the source too--the cleaner the source, the less work we have to do to it.

I've found the Sonic Foundry DirectX click filter to actually turn the scratches into a slight "burble". That's the only way I can describe it short of posting samples. It seems, too, that when you turn it up higher to really start cleaning up noise, it starts to go downhill fast.

 

I guess i'm blessed with an awfully good ear. I don't own the Waves plug-in because of the price, but I did use the two-week trial, and I head it change the sound every step of the way, no matter how I set it. I will give it one thing, the price is still justified because it did wonders on two of my hopeless records. One had "rips", or a tearing sound throughout the album, and Waves cleaned it right up. On another, it actually removed groove distortion! Oh, the sound changed in both cases, but the benifits far outweighed the drawbacks.

Exactly!

 

The only declicking tools I have experience with so far are CoolEdit and ClickFix for CoolEdit. I don't use ClickFix much anymore, instead I use CoolEdit's declick tools along with "spectral view" so I can see the clicks. I highlight areas between musical transients and find declick settings that get ONLY the clicks. Spectral view is fantastic because if you zoom in so your full horizontal view is about half a second or less, it lets you see well enough that you can actually count the clicks. (It doesn't take long to learn the difference between the look of a legitimate click and a transient occuring in the music.) The CoolEdit declicker tells you how many clicks you just removed, so you can tell right away if it was too aggressive even before you listen to it back. With difficult material such as horns I'll use the "fill single click now" option and get 'em one at a time. Sure it's time consuming...I spend an average of one hour of labor per one minute of stereo material, but the results are very rewarding. And when I'm done I know for sure I haven't taken out anything I didn't want to take out. I'd much rather hear the clicks than any declick artifacts. Having spent many an hour as a ham radio operator copying SSB signals with the noise blanker turned on, I'm sensitive to that kind of distortion. I really hate that sound! Over aggresive declicking reminds me too much of it! Maybe there's a magic declick bullet out there that could automate the process and save a lot of labor, but so far I'm still a little skeptical. (I'd really love to be wrong though!)

 

I agree, the Waves plugin is the best one, however I do not like to declick. What is the purpose? When I make a needle drop, its just that, a copy of the record, the way I would hear it if I were to play the vinyl. Pops and ticks are just part of listening to vinyl, and they really don't detract from the music IMO. However, the processing artifacts from declicking really bother me.

End thread crap

 

If I'm listening to vinyl on the stereo I'm not bothered by surface noise either. However if I'm making my own compilation CDR and some of the material is sourced from CD and some from vinyl, then I prefer to have the vinyl declicked.

 

Same here! Even if it's all vinyl, I don't want clicks. My purpose is to get a professional sounding CD-R out of the vinyl-something that sounds like it could be a master tape, but is actually from a record! It's why I try my best to get my needle drops clean, but I never overdo the surface noise removal.

BTW, that spectral view is the best, isn't it? Though I have a fast computer, it's why it still can take me days to declick an album. To me, it's not wasting time. It's a labor of love, especially for albums I like.

On certain projects, I will run the files through a tape emulator, compressor, an exciter, or a bit of EQ to help achieve a sound I want, but I don't lose the essense of the sound coming off the vinyl. I have stated variations of my philosophy on doing restorations because my methods to change from time to time, but my goal is always the same.

I take doing needle drops very seriously. I feel my resulting CD-Rs should be good enough to be sold commercially. It doesn't always happen that way, but that's my goal every time.

 

On the old Syntrillium CoolEdit user forum there was a descroption of a decrackle technique that became known as the "younglove method," named for the username of its inventor. It was a multi step process. It was not for taking out pops, but for a more constant type of crackle. First you use a section of crackle (with no big pops) to generate a noise profile. Then run a 100% NR keeping only noise over the whole file. Save that noise only file and then run a healthy declick over it. Then mix/paste/invert the noise only file over the declicked noise only file. The result is an inverted clicks file that you can mix with the original file. Since the inverted clicks file and the original are out of phase they cancel. Sometimes this really works miracles, and the best part is there are NO noise reduction artifacts in the finished product. I usually put the original and the inverted clicks in multi-track so that if there are areas where the process causes problems you can shut it off and declick those areas manually later or leave them alone. As I recall someone even wrote a scriptfor the process although I never used it. I've heard this method work where nothing else would. First time I heard the result I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

 

That was forum member David Younglove who wrote the script for his method that he developed. He is a member on our Audiomasters forum at: http://www.audiomastersforum.org/amforum/index.php

The forum is the independant replacement of the old Syntrillium site, and is the secondary Adobe Audition/Cool Edit user forum. Most of we original Synt members are there.

Anyway, the Younglove method has helped me restore some seriously hopeless cases, but I can't seem to make the script work.

 

How about giving the record a good clean first on a VPI, Nitty Gritty or similar RCM ?

 

Surely that's already a part of the routine of all of us! That should be a given...I have a Nitty Gritty, and use a home made cleaning formula I would swear by, but often a record's condition, pressing quality, vinyl quality or such will introduce noise that's still there after a cleaning. I don't hardly ever buy newer vinyl, so these things are always an issue with me.

 

Grant - Thanks for the tip on the Audiomasters forum. I've never been there but really miss the old CoolEdit forum so I'll check it out!

As far as cleaning the vinyl well before transferring it, I couldn't agree more. Sometimes that is the most effective declick process of all...and much faster than removing clicks one at a time with software! I must admit though, sometimes it's real easy to get so immersed in software that you ignore solutions in the "real world." Occassionally I need someone to remind me of the obvious!

 

I've been please with Wave Corrector - $45 USD to download it, I believe.

http://www.wavecor.co.uk/

 

If you're into Mac/Apples, Bias Peak 4.0 has a de-clicker. It occasionally works well in the automated mode, but it usually misses 90% of the clicks and pops, even very obvious ones. So I end up removing them one at a time. You can zoom in on a click down to the sample level and then zoom back out. This is a tedious process, but there are a few hotkeys you can use to make it just a bit faster.

I thought perhaps Peak wasn't the best de-clicker out there, but it sounds like all of them have their drawbacks, and the best way is to get dirty and do 'em one at at time. Thank God I can't find a full time job!

 

Enhanced Audio

I use DC Millenium for my restorations.You can remove clicks etc.. with its presets through the album similar to Cool Edit but with a bit more control. I usually cut/paste though either manually or letting the program do it. It uses a pretty sophisticated algorithm do replace transient noise. It works real good.

 

My experience with DCArt was that it's declicker casued degredation of the sound too much

 

I tried this last night with mixed results. The first question I have is. Why declick the noise file? If you just, mix/paste/invert the noise file into the original sound file. Wouldn't that cancel more of the noise (lite crackle)? The only thing I can figure out, why you would declick the noise file, then mix/paste/invert that over the noise file. You would be canceling out the NR artifacts in the noise file. No?

 

Well, this is the Younglove method developed by David Younglove on the Audioforums.

You declick the noise file to isolate the clicks. That way, you can take just the clicks out while not disturbing any of the actual music and leaving in the noise. You may want to handle the noise differently.

 

Grant,

After you mix/paste/invert the declicked file on to the noise file. Would you invert that into the sound file? Or just paste it the way it is, into the sound file? I ask, because I tried it both ways. The second time I tried it. I mix/paste/invert the declicked noise file into the sound file. It seemed to take more out. However, I detected a little NR artifacts that way.