Like just about everything else on this website, this procedure is controversial. Let's face it--anytime you have a diverse cross-section of dedicated and crazed perfectionists using sophisticated and complex software with many optional settings, you have the potential for armed conflict. Anyway: this is the way I do it at this time (and I do get good results).
1-Load track 01 of your project into your editing software.
2-Select the music portion ONLY of the track. Leave out the silent lead in, or any prolonged fade-out that approaches silence. If you do not select the music portion only, you will get bogus results in the next step.
3-Click; Effects/Noise Reduction/Click-Pop Eliminator. The Click-Pop Eliminator control box will appear. Now, this provides us with a bewildering array of unclear uptions, but don't hyperventilate: we are going to simplify. Forget the "Presets" box; we aren't going to use it. The same goes for the "Find Threshold Levels Only" button. Go ahead and check the box that says "pulse train verification" (this will help prevent filtering out percussion sounds instead of clicks). Uncheck the box that says "detect big pops." If there are any big pops, we will edit them out manually when we go through the next procedure, and leaving this box checked may put various percussive sounds in peril. Located next to the "Auto Find All Levels" button, the sensitivity and discrimination values should be set at their defaults of 14 (sensitivity) and 20 (discrimination).
Cool-Edit Pro Click-Pop Eliminator Control Box
4-Now click the "Auto Find All Levels" button. The software will busily analyze the selected portion of the track and return values that will fill the threshold detect-reject boxes in the left center of the control box. The "Auto-Find" values that will be returned are congruent with the initial sensitivity and discrimination settings (i.e., 14 & 24). You will get a neat little graphic display depicting the analysis results.
5-Finally, after all values are automatically set, press "OK" and the software will filter out the clicks and pops in track 01 according to theautomatically set parameters. In general. you will see that many more clicks will be rejected than are filtered out.
6-This usually works just great, but sometimes there is a problem. Let's say you're dealing with a relatively clean track, and the software starts laboriously filtering out thousands of clicks, proceeding very slowly. Obviously, something is wrong. The software could be seeing something in the music that it is incorrectly interpreting as "clicks." If you see this going on, click "cancel," and click the "undo" curved arrow on the toolbox to undo the filtering that has been done so far. If you have a relatively clean track, you can forego this procedure completely and proceed to the "Manual Removal of Clicks & Pops" section. Or, you can adjust the sensitivity and discrimation values and re-click the "Auto Find All Levels" button. I suggest increasing the sensitivity/discrimination values in increments of 2 (16,22--18,24--20,26, etc) until you find a level that gives you a realistic reduction in clicks.
Okay. Now you have let the software automatically filter out the clicks. It is time to move on to procedure 4 in order to manually eliminate whatever clicks and pops are left over. Or,
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