What are your must-have Audacity plugins/tools?

[loon]

I hate throat clicks and use one or the other of two tools to try to clear them up.
De-clicker works for me some of the time - at other places in the same paragraph it may be totally unable to find the click. The default settings are pretty good.
The Low Pass filter also works some of the time. I can sometimes narrow down an area with a click to a part of a syllable, hit Z to move the selection to zero crossings, and run the filter with extreme settings like 600 or 1000 Hz cutoff. The high frequencies of a click are vastly reduced or eliminated. It amazes me that our hearing system is so used to frequency content jumping around during speech this severe filtering is unnoticeable (if very brief).
Sometimes neither of these tools work and I have to live with a click.

[KevinS]

I hate throat clicks and use one or the other of two tools to try to clear them up.
De-clicker works for me some of the time - at other places in the same paragraph it may be totally unable to find the click. The default settings are pretty good.
The Low Pass filter also works some of the time. I can sometimes narrow down an area with a click to a part of a syllable, hit Z to move the selection to zero crossings, and run the filter with extreme settings like 600 or 1000 Hz cutoff. The high frequencies of a click are vastly reduced or eliminated. It amazes me that our hearing system is so used to frequency content jumping around during speech this severe filtering is unnoticeable (if very brief).
Sometimes neither of these tools work and I have to live with a click.

"Live with the click" is kind of a catchy motto.

[annise]

Did you see the post of a reader who solved his click problem by leaving his mobile phone in another room ? Anne

[KevinS]

Did you see the post of a reader who solved his click problem by leaving his mobile phone in another room ? Anne

Just yesterday I was editing and my phone was recharging close to the computer. There was a terrible crackling kind of noise. I thought my recording was ruined but I simply removed the phone. (After a lot of head scratching.) Problem solved!

[annise]

My motto is "try the easy fix first" . Anne

[SowasVon]

(Too much detail stuff, deleted)

[KevinS]

Sometimes neither of these tools work and I have to live with a click.

Before I was told about the declicker, I used a manual method of removing them, described here: viewtopic.php?p=2062501&hilit=Click#p2062501
In summary, mouth clicks are visible in the waveform by being more jagged than the rest of the wave and a usually last for just one complete sinus wave, so if you find them and cut out that one sinus wave, the click is gone.
Lately, I've found that instead of cutting, you can also copy-paste an intact sinus wave from right next to the click there. You may have to amplify or decrease the volume by a few dB though to make the substitute the same height as the original.
I will admit though that it can be very cumbersome to find the click, since it's not always that clearly visible. At times, I have to enlarge nearly to the max while also pulling the height of the track to a third or half of the window size to see it. Or roughly identify where it sits by cutting out larger portions and listening whether that removes it, then go sinus by sinus. But at that point, it becomes about how annoyed you are by it and whether you'd rather get on with editing the rest of the track.

I'm not quite sure I understand this, but could you not simply use the repair effect?

[SowasVon]

(Too much detail stuff, deleted)

[KevinS]

I'm not quite sure I understand this, but could you not simply use the repair effect?

Maybe, I have never tried it. Could you explain how to use it in this context? Or is it just highlight, repair?
In any case, this method is for when the automatic tools do not remove the click.

Sidenote, what the declicker plugin does is to iron out the jaggedness and turn the click into a smooth sinus wave.
But in order to do that, it seems to need a large enough sample of "OK" waveform so it knows how to reshape the click. So, if it doesn't remove it, you could try enlarging your sample.
If you can't do that because it's surrounded by plosives (p, t, k) that would get declicked as well, it may help to
- duplicate the sample (highlight, Ctrl + D),
- declick it in the second track and
- split off just the part with the (removed) click in both the new and original tracks (highlight, hold Shift, press up arrow, Ctrl + I) (this is so they're both the exact same length and position and you don't timeshift things in the next step)
- copy-paste the declicked smaller section into the original track

Also, the declicker can make "spitty" F sounds sound dry, since they, too, have a waveform with irregularities. Worth a try.

I could very well be mistaken, but I think the repair effect brings a small section---it will not work with any great length---to the middle (w?) of the sine wave. (Flattens it, so to speak.)

[TriciaG]

I'm thinking we really don't need to get into detailed technicalities in this thread, since it's kinda geared for new readers.

[SowasVon]

I'm thinking we really don't need to get into detailed technicalities in this thread, since it's kinda geared for new readers.

You're right, this'll be too much.
I'm deleting my posts. Too bad I cannot remove it from the quoting posts.

[stepheather]

I'm thinking we really don't need to get into detailed technicalities in this thread, since it's kinda geared for new readers.

...could we have an advanced version somewhere? I was kinda hoping to come back to this as I had specific issues. (For example, I have really bad distortion from traffic and noise removal not removing it. I don't think there's a way to remove it, but...I was going to look at these for guidance!)

[TriciaG]

I'm thinking we really don't need to get into detailed technicalities in this thread, since it's kinda geared for new readers.

...could we have an advanced version somewhere? I was kinda hoping to come back to this as I had specific issues. (For example, I have really bad distortion from traffic and noise removal not removing it. I don't think there's a way to remove it, but...I was going to look at these for guidance!)

Sure! Anyone can start a threads asking for advice, etc.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

4) Loudness Normalization - Every track I've done in the past 10 months has had this cool effect applied to it before exporting. Without the need for Replay Gain or running it through Checker, this has always resulted in a volume of 89dB, plus or minus a half decibel.

Now I'm curious. Why might one prefer Loudness Normalization over ReplayGain, or vice versa? (I mean, other than ReplayGain being a plugin you have to install. Once it's already installed, the convenience factor of each seems pretty comparable.)

[redrun]

Now I'm curious. Why might one prefer Loudness Normalization over ReplayGain, or vice versa? (I mean, other than ReplayGain being a plugin you have to install. Once it's already installed, the convenience factor of both seem pretty comparable.)

ReplayGain tells you about how much you need to adjust (using Amplify) to get to 89db, where Loudness Normalization automatically adjusts it for you.

Both do the same thing, but it is a good idea in general to know how far off you were before the correction: too quiet, and whichever tool you use to make it louder will also amplify all your background noise! Too loud, and you may be maxing out your mic's input at the loudest parts... and neither tool can fix the odd distortion ("clipping") you'll get in that case.