How to remove a single pop from a recording of a vinyl record

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

I have a recording I made of a vinyl record with one pop that I would like to remove. What is the best way to do this?

Thanks,

Greg

#2

With Ardour? There’s lots of choices. Assuming you can’t fix the vinyl and recordi it again, I’d start by splitting the region at the point of the pop, and using the region fadein and fadeout controls to tailor the noise. It’s got to be an interactive process, finding a compromise between an abrupt dropout to silence and an intrusive noise. I once made dozens of little cuts like that to reduce the key noise from a button accordion.
Also depending on the musical context you might be able to find a few milliseconds of similar sound (without the pop) that you could patch over it for a more seamless repair. Maybe from immediately before or after the pop, maybe from a place earlier or later where the same musical phrase is repeated.

#3

I’m not near my own computer to test it out and I’ve never really tried it in Ardour, but is it possible to zoom in close and “drag the sample”?

I know this is possible in the old Cool Edit program and in Audition; you can grab the offending sample(s) and drag them to new positions. But those suites were designed as editors, not full-bore audio recording and mixing environments such as Ardour.

If it can’t, it’d be nice if it could.

#4

“Dragging the sample” would be destructive editing, which Ardour doesn’t do by design.
Even operations like pitch-shifting which do change the stored PCM samples create a new region which is a modified copy of the old one.
You can zoom in to see individual samples in Ardour; I don’t know if you could then use automation to make a very fine grained attenuation profile over the pop.

#5

Another possibility would be to make a cut after the pop and one about 100 milliseconds before it, making a short region with the pop at the end. Drag RH edge of that small region back till the pop is gone, then fill in the gap by using the time stretch tool to lengthen the region to its original length.

#6

yes, zoom to the top with +
then cut the higher stuff
it could do the trick