Away pops & clicks & creaks

I’m helping a friend Jon Raney get his album ready to ship to CDBaby. Jon had the master tracks so in this case there was no help with recording. However, we both felt that the general over all volume of the album could be raised a bit. I used Adobe Audition formerly known as CoolEdit to  group “normalize” the tracks. I’ll talk about normalization some time later. What I want to talk about today is about Audition’s restoration effect called the “Click/Pop Eliminator”. You see normalization did a great job i.e. which was to raise the overall loudness of the tracks. Unfortunately it also raised a couple “faux pas” in the recording which were not very audible in the original recording but quite apparent now due to normalization. Jon had slightly moved his piano chair which got picked up by the mics.

Fortunately, Audition’s Click/Pop Eliminator very easily and basically with default settings was able to eliminate the transient chair creak. Here is what the user interface to the effect looks like:

Here is a blurb from the help text for the effect:

The Restoration > Click/Pop Eliminator effect detects and removes clicks and pops. Like the Auto Click/Pop Eliminator, this effect is ideal if you want to clean up the sound of vinyl recordings before transferring them to CD or another digital medium. The Click/Pop Eliminator, however, provides a much wider range of controls, letting you customize settings to repair other transient artifacts such as vocal plosives or radio static.

This is an increidibly handy thing to have and it worked like a charm. I also used the Graphic EQ effect to roll off the bass and perk up the piano on another tune and it worked great. I’ll probably blog about some of these effects at some other time. If everything goes right we should be sending some CDs to the U.S. copyright office next week and possibly to CDBaby as well.