Large "clicks" and little "crackle"

[Paul Riley]

 I use Audacity to transfer my LPs onto my B2. It deals very well with cleaning up large clicks but doesnt handle smaller crackle sounds, does anyone know of software that can remove crackle effectively.  Many thanks

[Daniel Taylor]

On Audacity, the level of tick/click reduction can be adjusted.  You have to play around with the settings to find out what suits you best.

[Mark Fishman]

> does anyone know of software that can remove crackle effectively.

Cleaning the LP thoroughly to remove dirt, dust, and debris from the grooves will go a long way toward reducing crackle. 

As far as software goes: large clicks show up in the wave form as outliers: their level is not close to that of the surrounding music, so they are easy to remove or reduce without significantly affecting the sounds that you want. But lower level crackle is about the same as the surrounding music, both in amplitude and in frequency range, so it's very hard to distinguish except by the human ear/brain system. Trying to remove or reduce it too much by software can result in loss of high frequencies, and make the music sound dull and lifeless. It will be less noisy, but in a very short time you'll be unhappy at the way the music sounds. This is true no matter how much money you want to spend on software and computers.

[Edwyn Corteen]

Hi Paul

As others have said cleaning is key, when I did mine I had some time off work due to an accident so took the plunge, with audacity I found the click filter did not remove all the imperfections but if you repeatedly use the zoom in icon you can identify and cut out individual imperfections without affecting the music as the section you remove is so short.

If you have some really dirty records just for fun Google "Use PVA glue to clean vinyl records" Believe me it works!