Declipper, and unexpected skips (Audacity)

[AprilWalters]

I noticed there was a "declipper" effect in Audacity -- since sometimes in moments of high emotion, the recording bar goes a bit red, I used it, and it seemed good. Are there any things I should watch out for when using this tool?

Also, when listening back to my stuff, sometimes a word gets skipped or crunched, like Audacity took a fraction of a second off from recording. Is there anything I can do to minimize that happening? Thanks!

[TriciaG]

What version of Audacity are you using? It must be a newer one - I don't have a declipper. I don't think many of us have used it. Feel free to experiment and share your results!

Regarding the skipping - Audacity is a resource hog. Close any unnecessary programs, and make sure you have a good amount of free space on your hard drive. That should help with the skipping.

[AprilWalters]

I have version 2.0.5

I had some "Huzzah"s in a reading, and I think they sound ok, with "declipper" run on them. I should have saved the "before" file so I could post both for a comparison.

[Kangaroo692]

I will update Audacity.

P.S. - I don't have trouble with using Audacity on my slow, slow, slow computer... it's the one thing that never causes any trouble.

[annise]

The best result with clipping is not to clip ,it is qyuite possible to shout softly , or to move back a bit . Clipping destroys part of the sound wave - a declipper can only do it's best to remake it .

Anne

[AprilWalters]

How does the magic of declipping happen? I understand noise-reduction, more or less- it identifies the sample wave that you say is "ungood", matches it and removes/flattens it. (Normally when I have a red bit, it's just a single-line.)

What effects do people use the most? (I use notch-filter (120, 5.0) and noise-removal, and for silences between lines in Dramatic Works, I find the line-flattener and silence-generator to be helpful.) (Can I add to the editing toolbar specific buttons for most-used tools?)

I think the crunching was from having Firefox open -- I need a lot of tabs "live" for when I am working, since I have so many projects, plus one window of Librivox tabs. So for this most recent recording, which was on PDF, I just captured the stop-start info into Word, closed the web browsers (Chrome's not as bad, but I didn't want it to think there was a power vaccum it could now fill.) It is annoying to have to close everything though. (Hard Drive Space - Audacity claims I have enough space to record 1880 hours more. RAM = 8G)

In Effects --> Preferences --> Recording, I see there are "latency" options -- I wonder if they would fix my crunch somewhat? I have Audio-to-buffer = 100; Latency Correction = -130. Would changing those numbers help?

[RuthieG]

Re the skipping: 8GB of memory should, of course, be plenty. But if you were to look at your Task Manager, you might be horrified to see how much memory is in use e.g. Chrome. My bet is that something (quite possibly Chrome or Windows) is quietly updating itself automatically in the background and causing the problems. You may also be surprised to see how many programs run at start up and are silently eating RAM even if you have no intention of using them. MSConfig will show you which programs start themselves when you boot up your computer. (I'm assuming you are a Windows user.)

Re clipping: I don't have any de-clipping plugins installed - never use them. I confess I have never heard of Declipper but Clip Fix says it "attempts to reconstruct clipped regions by interpolating the lost signal. It is only likely to be effective for repairing lightly clipped audio." If something has clipped badly enough to need repair, I re-record that part, but mostly the red vertical lines I see (View | Show Clipping in Audacity) have absolutely no ill-effects. If the clipping is on a consonant sound such as s or z, I wouldn't bother about it at all; there is no audible distortion.

Ruth