Declicking
VinylStudio has a powerful and flexible declicker which is very effective at removing the 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 intevention required.
To repair a click, VinylStudio examines the waveform on either side and reconstructs the damaged section using a mathematical technique called autoregression. As the following screenshot shows, the repair is usually a pretty good match to the (missing!) original and normally 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 easy to spot in the waveform display so fixing them manually is quick and easy, even if VinylStudio has missed them completely (although this is rare). For an example of a particularly badly damaged recording, click here.
Percussion and Brass Protection
When is a click not a click? Well, specifically, when it is a drumbeat or a blast from a brass or reed instrument, both of which look like clicks to VinylStudio's scanner. All declicking programs suffer from this problem in varying degrees, and the result is that drumbeats, handclaps and other percussion can be dulled, and (worse) brass, sax, synth and other such 'rasping' sounds can be distorted, sometimes badly so.
But don't be put off. 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 in the line above or refer to the tips for repairing clicks page in the online help.
Sound Samples
If you would like to hear some sound samples, please click here.
Software and website Copyright AlpineSoft, 2010.