Remove clicks, pops and impacts from an audio recording
When to use De-click or spectral attenuation, and how to preserve speech.
A slammed door, handling the phone or a digital click interrupts a conversation. Each is distracting but leaves a different signal. A brief click and a longer impact require different treatment.
A short spike differs from a long tail
Zoom in and listen with context. A brief digital spike is a candidate for De-click. A dull impact and its room tail last longer and should not be treated as an increasingly wide click. The spectrogram shows whether the event occupies narrow or broad frequencies.
De-click: adjust sensitivity first
Select a short passage around the click including neighbouring speech. Start Preview and adjust sensitivity gradually. Match maximum width to the actual event. Widening and strength refine the repair; excessive settings can dull consonants.
Attenuate longer impacts in a narrow spectral region
If the event is separated from speech in time or frequency, draw a spectral selection around it. Start gently. Speech occupying that same region can also be reduced; the tool does not generate replacement words.
Do you only need to tame the loud spike?
Peak reduction reduces the sample portion above threshold. It is useful for an excessively loud spike when full removal is unnecessary. The tail may remain and strong settings can distort. For clipped peaks, consult De-clip instead.
Review the repair within the complete word
The event should be less intrusive in Result without complete speech fragments in Residual. After applying, listen to the full sentence: a locally clean repair may stand out in rhythm or timbre. Undo and retry with a narrower selection if necessary.
Try your own recording
Start with a short passage you can review carefully. Local editing and Preview are free; finished-clip export is paid. The editor’s price calculation shows the current cost.