Audacity, god bless it, is the only piece of record-restoration software discussed on this site that is truly freeware. Consequently, in the spirit of not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am very reluctant to say anything bad about it. And, in fact, though many other applications have features that Audacity does not have, and although there are some things that Audacity does not do very well, this is in fact one impressive piece of software, and with its small cadre of volunteer softwear developers, it is going to get much better. It is, first of all, a wave editor that is, like certain high-end applications, a "swiss army knife" full of little tools. For our purposes, we are only going to use a few of those tools. There is one tool, which is a late addition to the Audacity suite of mini-aps, that is dedicated to click removal, and this particular ap is unfortunately not anywhere near ready for prime-time. Consequently, we have to find another application that will provide excellent click-filtering capabilities to use in conjunction with Audacity. This software should be low-priced. Although other applications can suffice, I have grown to respect and trust Droid Informatica's powerful little shareware application De-Popper, which does a truly excellent job of filtering out clicks and pops and costs less than $20.00. In the following procedures, I will treat Audacity & De-Popper as a symbiotic team of applications.
When you download the latest beta version of Audacity here, I suggest that you also opt for installing the lame mp3 codec and all of the available plug-ins (links available on the same page), Without the mp3 codec, Audacity will not be able to save (export) files in mp3 form. We will only use a small percentage of the plug-ins, but they are all fun to play around with. All of this stuff is free. De-Popper version 2, which is inexpensive but not free, can be downloaded here. This shareware ap has a 30 day free trial period, so you can get working with this right away.
If you follow the procedures outlined here for using this combination of applications, I think you will be surprised at what good results you will get. This combo is bottom-line in price, but the resulting quality is top-notch.
Proceed to Procedure 1: Recording and De-Noising with Audacity. Or,
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