gregjohn <pte### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> [-- text/plain, encoding 8bit, charset: iso-8859-1, 17 lines --]

> Hi, I've got an important problem and the Audacity website doesn't have working
> links to a forum.

> I have an audio track of someone talking where some of the vocals go just off
> scale.  I want to make this a high-quality soundtrack to an animation using
> TMPGEnc.  Any tips?

> One thing I tried was to "Amplify" in Audacity where I just reduced the max
> volume to about 90% of full scale.  This gave, in Audacity, a strange click at
> these portions where it went offscale.   Then I tried Adding Noise (fullscale
> white noise reduced -20 dB twice) to the soundtrack, then doing a "Noise
> Removal" on the combined track.   Right now I'm rendering this with TMPGenc to
> see if I have the same problem.

  As you might imagine, the clicks and cracks are caused by the original
wave being clamped at the maximum amplitude, causing a flat plateau at
the top of the wave, with sharp transitions.

  While the information which went off-scale is forever lost (if you don't
have the original recording), the clicks could be removed by reducing the
overall volume of the sample (as you did) and then smoothing out these
plateaus (making them smooth curves rather than sharp plateaus). However,
I don't know if Audacity (or any other program) has a filter for this.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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