This is a fantastic tutorial, and trust me, I've watched plenty! They all say the exact same thing. I've been working on my vocal technique, as well as using the Nyquist de-clicker for specific spots (I find if you use it for an entire track, you can lose the occasional consonant), or using the spectral tools. This technique is SO much more precise. Love it.
Thank you for your kind words. In fact, the entire reason I made this tutorial is because every other tutorial says nothing about the most powerful method of click removal.
I'm new to voice over and I recently had a customer point out the mouth clicks in one of the recordings I sent. I was devastated because I just didn't know how to take them out. I also can't download the de-clicker plugin so your tutorial is a Godsend. Thank you!
I'm so happy you found it useful! I myself have a lot of imperfections in my audio and so I need to use this custom technique to get rid of them! I've tried many sorts of plugins and unfortunately they cannot come close to manually removing them, though they can do a good job with the ones that occur in the silent areas.
@@WildEarthPhoto I’m having a really difficult time trying to do this. When I zoom in the distortion isn’t easily identifiable and I feel so lost. My audacity looks a little different from yours and idk why
@Latoya Did you right click on the scale and selecte "dB"? You need to do that, or else it won't work. Also, you need to zoom in a lot, not just a little.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! Finally, a solution for me. I had figured out a way to do it, but it was way more tedious and time consuming than what you demonstrated! Thank you so much!
You are welcome. I'd also recommend assigning keys to "zoom to selection" and "playback at reduced speed" so you can very quickly get to the problem areas. After some practice and with the right keyboard shortcuts, you should be able to process large amounts of audio quite quickly.
This is SO helpful, thank you so much ! Listening to my recordings makes me self-conscious, I really hope I don't make so many wet noises when I talk to people...
I think in real life it's very hard to hear the noises. Partly because you are very far away from talking people in typical situations. But our brain and ears compensate. In audio recordings the poor quality of being far away doesn't sound right, so we get close to the microphone, which is really what causes the problems.
So.. I know this was posted a year ago, but certain parts of my audio look ENTIRELY jagged, and are not smooth or clean like yours, and yet the audio sounds fine, and yet clicks are still hiding inside (I have DB mode on too ofc), do you have any help for this?
Well, there's nothing wrong with chatting on an old video. What parts of your audio are looking jagged? There could be a few reasons for this: (1) you have a lot of background noise. (2) "s" "sh" and "f" sounds will look jagged. In that case you've got to find the hidden clicks by sound with the "slow playback" feature and heal around the approximate area until you've gotten rid of it. (3) Your voice is like Loius Armstrong in which case you've got to use (2) to solve the problem. Denoising first and also cancelling out the low and high ends outside of your voice range can help a little.
Thank you so much for this! I've been trying to find ways to get rid of mouth noises but haven't been able to. Even with the use of the declicker plugin. I'm excited to implement these techniques in my future projects.
Thank you really appreciate your effort here all I would ever need. Also appreciate that you explain how to do this properly in a step by step very clear fashion. Your the best 😊
Yeah, I was actually surprised how well it works. It absolutely sounds like there was no problem in the first place. If you also practice good voice technique, the there'll be just a few of them and it will elevate your audio so much. I use it on 100% of my videos!
Bro you are a flippen hero - I have been deleting waves at the zero points and I literally have wrist strain it's insane and I've wasted so much time - wish I watched this a month ago.
Yes indeed! I have expand to selection, repair, silence, all as keyboard shortcuts. Didn't know about using the high-pass filter though...does it sound natural?
@@WildEarthPhoto It's the solution I found online and seems to fix plosives, at least for my purposes (TH-cam content creator). Only apply it on the plosive itself of course. Also some kind of pop filter or cover, at least to prevent moisture from ruining the mic from using it. The thing I'm having trouble with is weird extended mouth sounds on "qu" and "f", so unfortunately Repair doesn't fix those since they're way longer than 128. It's probably because I sit right up to my mic since if I don't then there's an echo problem. I don't have a proper set-up for that lol. I also need to buy green apples since apparently that helps with wet noises.
@Design: some points: (a) if you need to repair longer than 128, you can do it in overlapping sections. (b) sometimes, deleting a segment and repairing the intersection point works, but that doesn't work for video all the time since it goes out of sync, (c) maybe try different places in your room or padding it more for echo? (d) the quality of pop filter might make a difference. BTW which mic are you using?
@@WildEarthPhoto I'm editing the audio before the video, so I don't need to worry about syncing. I've been able to use Repair on the obvious, visible problems (like the examples you used), but not for the extended parts. If I Repair multiple times side-by-side, the quality difference becomes noticeable. I've been deleting the problem sections and it's been sounding fine so that's my fix for now. I do need to properly handle echo, I just don't have a proper room for it yet, but thankfully I can make due for my purposes by recording up close enough to mitigate it. Or I can probably just buy one of those small echo shields. I have a Shure SM7B. I'm using the thicker cover on it so I can have it up close. It works great but obviously I need to take the necessary mouth noise and echo precautions.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies Pardon me for jumping in. I solved the echo problem in my "studio" by tacking moving blankets to the walls. Harbor Freight has some nice thick moving blankets at a reasonable price. Just be wary of removing too much echo. A combination of sound deadening and sound refraction seems to be best. Troy Baker once said that using the egg-crate cardboard you get as packaging can be a good, inexpensive way to mitigate sound problems when you record. If you're already set up, then disregard this.
I 'de click' my audio manually as well (full time audio narrator here) - I box select the clicks in the spectral display and delete, much faster than this procedure, and gives the same level of top quality results
I am not really sure spectral display+box select+delete is faster. First, and most importantly, spectral display doesn't easily display every type of click. It DOES display some kinds easily, but not others as precisely as the waveform. Second, what I display here is very fast -- if you do it right. I have keys on the left hand side of my keyboard mapped to repair, silence, delete, and zoom, and I can remove clicks VERY quickly using the method in the video. I also do other custom adjustments that seems much more intuitive in the waveform mode as well. At this point, I just hear the click and it's gone in the next moment. While your method is pretty good for some kinds of clicks, I don't think it is ideal for producing the highest quality in the shortest time.
@ thanks for the reply, yea I can imagine in this video you slowed everything down to explain it rather than to show your real workflow speed. I can get my workflow to sound like there was no clicks or mouth issues at all, but I am interested to try your method, so thanks for that! 👍
You might also have better narration abilites or technique :) I make so many strange noises, probably more than most, so I might need something heavy-duty like this! haha.
I’m having a problem with the play at speed head. When I slowdown the audio it plays for a second then the audio goes quiet. Even in the sound monitor it goes into the green then doesn’t move. I only get sound from the play at speed when I up it to around 30x When I start at 30 and lower the speed while it plays it works for a bit then cuts back to zero sound
There is something wrong with the way your audio is setup. I am not sure what that is but it may be your audio driver. I've seen effects like this on Linux before. The solution would depend on your system: upgrade your audio driver, get a new sound card, make sure you're using pulseaudio if on Linux, upgrade Audacity if you're using an older version, try a different distro if you're using Linux.
@@WildEarthPhoto what fixed my issue was issue was exporting the audio file and opening back up in audacity . I’m following your guide but I notice sometimes when I repair a sound I still hear it or it creates another kind of noise when I repair it.
When I zoom into my audio it doesn’t look like yours. My clicks don’t show as easily and I switched to DB. Sometimes I hear a click and my waveform is completely flat. When I use linear amp or linear db my waveforms are all completely flat. They only show up in logarithmic. Any idea why this is?
My first guess is that your audio is too quiet. You should first noise reduce (if necessary) and amplify it so you've got just a few DB's to spare before clipping. You can also expand the size of the track to see a bit better by dragging the edge of the track.
You are not supposed to silence it, you are supposed to repair it. But there should be also a way to "cut and delete", my "delete" function automatically cuts and merges.
Go to preferences and then keyboard. The command is called "Zoom To Selection". I forgot the default mapping, because I have it mapped to C. In general, it's a good idea to have all the commands you need mapped to the keyboard close together so you don't have to move your hand much.
I'm glad you liked it. Check out my other audacity tutorial too where I go over some other unusual techniques as well. The link is in the pinned comment!
What do I do if there is a click but no wave form I can see? Its just a flat line. I ended up doing the copy and paste over method and it worked. I just thought I might be missing something.
First, make sure you're using the logarithmic scale. However, it is true that occasionally, there are some clicks that are not visible. In that case, there are two methods, both of which work: 1. Find out where it is and repair it anyway. Use the slow playback to find out where it is 2. Just silence the section, if it's after the end of a word. Silencing a tiny piece won't make an audible difference sometimes.
@@WildEarthPhoto I'm trying to train myself to minimize the mouth noise to begin with. I've also tried the declicker plug-in. It does clean up the clicks quite a bit, but it can affect the rest of the audio.
@Mladen -- Yes, that is true! The declicker plugin does do something. In fact, I often use it in conjunction with the manual technique here. It's especially useful if you select a piece of audio without hard sounds (t,p,d) and apply it selectively.
![[Tutorial] Audacity for ACX - Remove breaths, mouth noises and meet ACX Requirements](/img/n.gif)
Check out my other more comprehensive Audacity tutorial here: th-cam.com/video/5XDy02w4PUU/w-d-xo.html
Literally the best and only video I've found on how to actually fix these issues. Thank you.
Thanks! I made this tutorial since I couldn't find another that mentioned how to do this :)
This is a fantastic tutorial, and trust me, I've watched plenty! They all say the exact same thing. I've been working on my vocal technique, as well as using the Nyquist de-clicker for specific spots (I find if you use it for an entire track, you can lose the occasional consonant), or using the spectral tools. This technique is SO much more precise. Love it.
Thank you for your kind words. In fact, the entire reason I made this tutorial is because every other tutorial says nothing about the most powerful method of click removal.
I'm new to voice over and I recently had a customer point out the mouth clicks in one of the recordings I sent. I was devastated because I just didn't know how to take them out. I also can't download the de-clicker plugin so your tutorial is a Godsend. Thank you!
I'm so happy you found it useful! I myself have a lot of imperfections in my audio and so I need to use this custom technique to get rid of them! I've tried many sorts of plugins and unfortunately they cannot come close to manually removing them, though they can do a good job with the ones that occur in the silent areas.
@@WildEarthPhoto I’m having a really difficult time trying to do this. When I zoom in the distortion isn’t easily identifiable and I feel so lost. My audacity looks a little different from yours and idk why
@Latoya Did you right click on the scale and selecte "dB"? You need to do that, or else it won't work. Also, you need to zoom in a lot, not just a little.
@@WildEarthPhoto I did all of that. I'll keep playing around with it until I figure it out.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!! Finally, a solution for me. I had figured out a way to do it, but it was way more tedious and time consuming than what you demonstrated! Thank you so much!
You are welcome. I'd also recommend assigning keys to "zoom to selection" and "playback at reduced speed" so you can very quickly get to the problem areas. After some practice and with the right keyboard shortcuts, you should be able to process large amounts of audio quite quickly.
This is SO helpful, thank you so much !
Listening to my recordings makes me self-conscious, I really hope I don't make so many wet noises when I talk to people...
I think in real life it's very hard to hear the noises. Partly because you are very far away from talking people in typical situations. But our brain and ears compensate. In audio recordings the poor quality of being far away doesn't sound right, so we get close to the microphone, which is really what causes the problems.
So.. I know this was posted a year ago, but certain parts of my audio look ENTIRELY jagged, and are not smooth or clean like yours, and yet the audio sounds fine, and yet clicks are still hiding inside (I have DB mode on too ofc), do you have any help for this?
Well, there's nothing wrong with chatting on an old video. What parts of your audio are looking jagged? There could be a few reasons for this: (1) you have a lot of background noise. (2) "s" "sh" and "f" sounds will look jagged. In that case you've got to find the hidden clicks by sound with the "slow playback" feature and heal around the approximate area until you've gotten rid of it. (3) Your voice is like Loius Armstrong in which case you've got to use (2) to solve the problem.
Denoising first and also cancelling out the low and high ends outside of your voice range can help a little.
Thank you so much for this! I've been trying to find ways to get rid of mouth noises but haven't been able to. Even with the use of the declicker plugin. I'm excited to implement these techniques in my future projects.
Nice. It will take some time at first but if you do it a dozen times, you will get quite fast at it.
Thank you really appreciate your effort here all I would ever need. Also appreciate that you explain how to do this properly in a step by step very clear fashion. Your the best 😊
Thanks for your encouragement. It's comments like yours that keep this channel going!
bro just decided to let the world know. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
You are welcome.
Dude, thank you so much. This methos of using the repair tool works very well to erase those damn clicks noises
It works quite well indeed. Glad it helped you!
Thanks this is amazing - I don't even need to slow it down to find the pops and can easily just zoom in and repair.
Yeah, I was actually surprised how well it works. It absolutely sounds like there was no problem in the first place. If you also practice good voice technique, the there'll be just a few of them and it will elevate your audio so much. I use it on 100% of my videos!
You explained the repair function to me properly enjoyed
Thanks so much for watching!
Bro you are a flippen hero - I have been deleting waves at the zero points and I literally have wrist strain it's insane and I've wasted so much time - wish I watched this a month ago.
Thanks, glad it helped!
Very well explained! I just added Repair to my keyboard shortcuts. I also added High-Pass Filter 'cause that's what I use to remove plosives.
Yes indeed! I have expand to selection, repair, silence, all as keyboard shortcuts. Didn't know about using the high-pass filter though...does it sound natural?
@@WildEarthPhoto It's the solution I found online and seems to fix plosives, at least for my purposes (TH-cam content creator). Only apply it on the plosive itself of course. Also some kind of pop filter or cover, at least to prevent moisture from ruining the mic from using it. The thing I'm having trouble with is weird extended mouth sounds on "qu" and "f", so unfortunately Repair doesn't fix those since they're way longer than 128. It's probably because I sit right up to my mic since if I don't then there's an echo problem. I don't have a proper set-up for that lol. I also need to buy green apples since apparently that helps with wet noises.
@Design: some points: (a) if you need to repair longer than 128, you can do it in overlapping sections. (b) sometimes, deleting a segment and repairing the intersection point works, but that doesn't work for video all the time since it goes out of sync, (c) maybe try different places in your room or padding it more for echo? (d) the quality of pop filter might make a difference. BTW which mic are you using?
@@WildEarthPhoto I'm editing the audio before the video, so I don't need to worry about syncing. I've been able to use Repair on the obvious, visible problems (like the examples you used), but not for the extended parts. If I Repair multiple times side-by-side, the quality difference becomes noticeable. I've been deleting the problem sections and it's been sounding fine so that's my fix for now.
I do need to properly handle echo, I just don't have a proper room for it yet, but thankfully I can make due for my purposes by recording up close enough to mitigate it. Or I can probably just buy one of those small echo shields. I have a Shure SM7B. I'm using the thicker cover on it so I can have it up close. It works great but obviously I need to take the necessary mouth noise and echo precautions.
@@DesignFrameCaseStudies Pardon me for jumping in. I solved the echo problem in my "studio" by tacking moving blankets to the walls. Harbor Freight has some nice thick moving blankets at a reasonable price. Just be wary of removing too much echo. A combination of sound deadening and sound refraction seems to be best. Troy Baker once said that using the egg-crate cardboard you get as packaging can be a good, inexpensive way to mitigate sound problems when you record.
If you're already set up, then disregard this.
Wow! this awesome! Thank you, so much for this great technique. what a great job.
I hope you can improve your audio with it.
This was incredibly helpful in my own voice work. Thank you for sharing.
I'm so glad it helped!
dude finnaaly, this is byfar one of the most usefull tutorials! thank you!
I made it because I couldn't find another tutorial that explained it, and I kinda stumbled upon it by accident.
I 'de click' my audio manually as well (full time audio narrator here) - I box select the clicks in the spectral display and delete, much faster than this procedure, and gives the same level of top quality results
I am not really sure spectral display+box select+delete is faster. First, and most importantly, spectral display doesn't easily display every type of click. It DOES display some kinds easily, but not others as precisely as the waveform.
Second, what I display here is very fast -- if you do it right. I have keys on the left hand side of my keyboard mapped to repair, silence, delete, and zoom, and I can remove clicks VERY quickly using the method in the video. I also do other custom adjustments that seems much more intuitive in the waveform mode as well. At this point, I just hear the click and it's gone in the next moment.
While your method is pretty good for some kinds of clicks, I don't think it is ideal for producing the highest quality in the shortest time.
@ thanks for the reply, yea I can imagine in this video you slowed everything down to explain it rather than to show your real workflow speed. I can get my workflow to sound like there was no clicks or mouth issues at all, but I am interested to try your method, so thanks for that! 👍
You might also have better narration abilites or technique :) I make so many strange noises, probably more than most, so I might need something heavy-duty like this! haha.
@ no I’m the same 🤪 thanks for the help
This was so good! Thank you!
You are welcome.
is there a way to repair plosives?
Good question. Another commenter mentioned the high-pass filter but I haven't tested it yet.
Very good video. I'll have to give it a try when I get problems like this. Thanks 😀 👍
I’m having a problem with the play at speed head. When I slowdown the audio it plays for a second then the audio goes quiet. Even in the sound monitor it goes into the green then doesn’t move. I only get sound from the play at speed when I up it to around 30x
When I start at 30 and lower the speed while it plays it works for a bit then cuts back to zero sound
There is something wrong with the way your audio is setup. I am not sure what that is but it may be your audio driver. I've seen effects like this on Linux before. The solution would depend on your system: upgrade your audio driver, get a new sound card, make sure you're using pulseaudio if on Linux, upgrade Audacity if you're using an older version, try a different distro if you're using Linux.
@@WildEarthPhoto what fixed my issue was issue was exporting the audio file and opening back up in audacity . I’m following your guide but I notice sometimes when I repair a sound I still hear it or it creates another kind of noise when I repair it.
This was just what I needed; thank you!
I am happy you like it! After some practice, it gets really fast. I can do 5 minutes of audio now in around half an hour.
When I zoom into my audio it doesn’t look like yours. My clicks don’t show as easily and I switched to DB. Sometimes I hear a click and my waveform is completely flat.
When I use linear amp or linear db my waveforms are all completely flat. They only show up in logarithmic. Any idea why this is?
My first guess is that your audio is too quiet. You should first noise reduce (if necessary) and amplify it so you've got just a few DB's to spare before clipping. You can also expand the size of the track to see a bit better by dragging the edge of the track.
@@WildEarthPhotothat did work, how does your audio automatically join back together after you cut it out? Mine leaves a gap
You are not supposed to silence it, you are supposed to repair it. But there should be also a way to "cut and delete", my "delete" function automatically cuts and merges.
How did you highlight that clip and zoom in?
Go to preferences and then keyboard. The command is called "Zoom To Selection". I forgot the default mapping, because I have it mapped to C. In general, it's a good idea to have all the commands you need mapped to the keyboard close together so you don't have to move your hand much.
This is awesome. Thank you!!
I'm glad you liked it. Check out my other audacity tutorial too where I go over some other unusual techniques as well. The link is in the pinned comment!
Thank you for sharing. I also use Audacity. 👏👏👏👏👏👏
You are welcome. Audacity is great! Anything but Adobe.
you're a goddamn hero
Now that's my kinda comment! Thanks!
This is great. Thank you.
I am very happy you found this method useful!
Thanks so much! This was so useful
Hope it helps you improve!
What do I do if there is a click but no wave form I can see? Its just a flat line. I ended up doing the copy and paste over method and it worked. I just thought I might be missing something.
First, make sure you're using the logarithmic scale. However, it is true that occasionally, there are some clicks that are not visible. In that case, there are two methods, both of which work:
1. Find out where it is and repair it anyway. Use the slow playback to find out where it is
2. Just silence the section, if it's after the end of a word. Silencing a tiny piece won't make an audible difference sometimes.
Thanks for this.
I'm glad it helps! Have you tried other methods of removing clicks also?
@@WildEarthPhoto I'm trying to train myself to minimize the mouth noise to begin with. I've also tried the declicker plug-in. It does clean up the clicks quite a bit, but it can affect the rest of the audio.
@Mladen -- Yes, that is true! The declicker plugin does do something. In fact, I often use it in conjunction with the manual technique here. It's especially useful if you select a piece of audio without hard sounds (t,p,d) and apply it selectively.
Thank you so much.
I'm very glad it helped!
Your the best
Yes, that is right. hahaha.
ajudou muito 👍
Ficou feliz que você gostou disso! Boa sorte com sua fotografia!
thank u so much 🫂
You're welcome.