Clipping - your opinion wanted...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christoffah
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Christoffah

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Hi guys,

To cut a long story short, I'm recording a CD. A lot of my bass clips due to a lot of it being cut and moved around as it lagged a bit (my PC doesnt seem to cope with play back and recording simultaneously perfectly). I've moved it all into place, and because the sound waves aren't perfectly continuous, there are often little clicks here and there.

I've just spent hours getting rid of all the clicks in three songs. It's taken me all evening and I don't know if I should even bother; because they can only be heard when the bass is soloed. When I play the drums and bass together, I can't even hear them, so once everything else is recorded I doubt they'll be noticeable.

That's where I want your opinion. Would you get rid of the clips? I want the CD sounding as best as I can, but I could be using this time to lay down the guitar. I just don't know if it's worth doing, as I can't even notice 95% of the clicks (except the more obvious ones which will definately be sorting out).

Any experts know about this?

MANY thanks!!!
 
I asked my audio teacher (also a record engineer over here) the same thing last week and he said that one solution was to use crossfade, but he said he personally would never touch it - never got the answer as to why. Right now I'm doing it the manual way in Cubase... wouldn't crossfade lose some of my sound? Might give it a go, if I can find how to us it..
 
and either way, is it really worth doing given it's actually unnoticeable?
 
You HAVE to crossfade.

Cutting up the original audio and moving it around has caused the sound waves to meet up with each other at crazy volume differences and on varying phases! The "jumps" in volume and the drastic change in phase are what is causing the little "clicks".

The only way to fix that is to crossfade.

How many notes did you adjust per song?
 
I have to cut up the original a good amount because my PC can't keep up to me playing in perfect time. I need more RAM or something.

I'd say there was a good 20 or so in each song, and I've just completed another one. Where can I find 'Crossfade' in Cubase?
 
Hate to double post, but judging on how both of you have suggested using crossfade, I take it that it's important to get rid of these clicks. Could you explain why? I've tried listening to a demo of one of my songs on four different stereos and I've never noticed a click, and neither has my sister (a fresh ear). What's the problem if it can't be heard?
 
If you've got overlapping parts, just highlight them and hit "X" on the keyboard. Done.

Well, unless you want to futz around with the x-fade curves. In which case, while the whole thing is highlighted, doubleclick in the area where the clips overlap and you'll get the x-fade dialog. There you can set the curves and select whether you want consistent volume or consistent power (apparent volume).
 
Wavelab has an automatic error correction that will fix that.
 
It's important to note that what you are talking about is not clipping, but the clicks that happen when audio is sliced up and the edges of the new edits don't match.

You can avoid this in a couple ways:

One, use crossfades as has already been mentioned.

Two, make your edits and joins carefully, so that the two audio files are joined at a zero crossing. A zero crossing is where the waveform crosses the center line.

Bottom line, you HAVE to fix those edits. Even if you can't hear them or think you can't hear them. To leave them would simply be very sloppy work.

Your teacher was dead wrong when he said he'd never touch those edits. I have no idea what he meant by that, and if he meant that he wouldn't fix the clicks caused by mismatched audio edits then he shouldn't be an audio engineer and shouldn't be teaching it.

Just go through and do crossfades over those edits. 20 per song is *nothing*, that shouldn't take long at all. You don't need to crossfade large portions of audio, just a little bit should work fine. Try maybe 300 samples on each side of the edit, and then work up from there. After a little experimentation you'll find the right amount of samples to crossfade and then fixing the clicks will go very quickly.
 
Making crossfades at a zero crossing isn't enough. You have to have the second audio clip going the opposit direction of the zero crossing as relative to the first clip. If you have the first clip come from se + down the zero, and the next clip starts at zero and goes +, you STILL have a problem, even though it is zero crossing.

This guy is a total newb on this, and little things like that need to be explained.

While you may not hear the little "click" in a dense mix, if you were to run that audio to a compressor, you will certainly make that little noise potentionally more obvious. Thus, like Mr.Albert says, you gotta take care of them crossfades.

IF when it is all said and done and you cannot hear the little clicks and noises in a dense mix, well, then you don't hear it. Simple as that, and you can probably get away with not fixing it. This would be akin to whether you apply dither to audio that is noisy. You most likely won't ever hear it. Or, if a song doesn't have any kind of fade out, you would benfit little from dithering.

But, that is another topic altogether.

Again, if you can't hear the noise with the whole mix playing, well, I guess you can get away with not fixing the stuff. But, I would probably be prone to fixing it myself.
 
make sure you have cubase set to snap at zero crossing it makes sure you dont get all those 'clicks' .. i had similiar trouble with my fades until i had that option checked ..

Preferences / Editing / Audio / [] snap at zero crossing

it wont help you now, but it will help you later..

gl
 
apps with true autocrossfades ( Vegas, Some incarnations of Sonar, Samplitude and now The REAPER [ http://www.cockos.com/reaper/ ] ) make this a non issue. In cubendo, youre going to have to spend some time

still DO IT!

I am betting where those clicks happen are the LOUDEST parts of your song in peak measurment. Level wasting for sure.

These types of clicks can and will go OVER zero, and when reconstructed by a D/A can be a surely illegal signal even if cubendo shows their peaks UNDER zero
 
Ford Van said:
Making crossfades at a zero crossing isn't enough. You have to have the second audio clip going the opposit direction of the zero crossing as relative to the first clip. If you have the first clip come from se + down the zero, and the next clip starts at zero and goes +, you STILL have a problem, even though it is zero crossing.
Click to expand...

This is correct, excellent explaination!

I scored a multimedia projects years ago, one of the first on the internet that attempted a musical score for an interactive animated series.

Anyway, due to the extreme bandwidth limitations of the time, the musical segments had to be short and they had to loop seamlessly. The end of the music had to have a perfect zero crossing with the beginning of the music--not always an easy task! Actually sometimes nearly impossible, but I got really good at looping audio and doing zero crossing edits.

So even though it's easier to highlight some audio and do a crossfade, I still tend to go for a zero crossing edit on hard cuts, just for the challenge of it.
 
Sounds like an editing issue more than a mixing issue. Good replies.

Christoffah

At the root of the problem:

One thing that can help you out is knowing how to reserve a seperate time to focus on a seperate task.

One practice that I incorporated was treating mixing and editing sessions completely apart. In fact, some engineers specialize in editing alone, or they have an assitant engineer do it for them.

Editing on zero crossings, selecting good takes from unacceptable takes (for whatever reasons), fades, cross fades, removing silences, even redrawing a wave form (extreme case) are all things to focus on in editing.

That insures that you never have embarrasing clicks showing up at any point. The thought should always be, "if everything is going to be heard, then obviously I don't want anyone to hear clicks, pops, hiss, noise and/or any other distracting nuances in the music".


You could run error correction or click removal, but that won't do anything if you have a bad edit.
 
noisewreck said:
If you've got overlapping parts, just highlight them and hit "X" on the keyboard. Done.
Click to expand...

Oh. My. God.

Why did I not know it was that simple?! It pretty much fixes these clicks perfectly and I cannot notice a dramatic difference in volume.

This forum actually kicks ass, I'm very glad I signed up here. Thanks to all of you for your comments, I'm pleasantly suprised that this was discussed for 15 posts.

Originally Posted by Ford Van
Making crossfades at a zero crossing isn't enough. You have to have the second audio clip going the opposit direction of the zero crossing as relative to the first clip. If you have the first clip come from se + down the zero, and the next clip starts at zero and goes +, you STILL have a problem, even though it is zero crossing.

After zooming in to the maximum view, it looks as if it has been recorded perfectly and it sounds fine when soloed, so when with the other instruments I'm sure it'll sound just fine. I know that my CD isn't going to sound as immense as something you'd get in the shops due to the 'harsh' sounded that my recorded guitar seems to have (which I'm sure I'll find answers for on this awesome forum), so crossfade seems to be just what I was after.

I didn't know it was that simple. I had this feeling in me that Cubase would be able to fix those more quickly than by manually adjusting the waves so that they match.

Thanks so much everybody!! :D:D:D
 
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