Remove pops in recording?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ckolling
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ckolling

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I recorded our worship band at church, and on all 7 channels of audio, there are loud pops. They sound like a quick burst of white noise. They appear random, as they are on all channels, at different times.
I am using a Presonus 24.4.2 mixing board, using Presonus Capture to record the mix as separate channels, which exports as WAV files.
i then take these into Reaper, or more recently Adobe Audition to master each song into an MP3 for us to improve as a band.
However, this time, there are lots of these loud pops I am talking about. They haven't been there before. Not sure what's going on.
ANYHOW, I started manually cleaning them up in Reaper by zooming in, and splitting the spikes with cross faders. However, this is very, very tedious manual work.
Can somebody please help me figure out a simpler (automatic, or easier way)? Surely there is something I can use, since the spikes are so obvious on the waveform.
I am a beginner to DAW, and really just have applied some effects, and split up songs.
Thank you very much,
Chris
MP3 and soundwave picture attached.
 

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Usually noises like this are happening in your DAW from a CPU issue (assuming they are not caused by the mics/wiring/devices).
 
Most of the mics are Shure 57 I think, however my bass guitar is going direct to the board. Is a DI box. This problem just started. I have recorded 2 other weeks of services and had no issues.
I have also taken the raw Wav files and tried them in Reaper on 2 computers, my work laptop is 2 weeks old, 8 Gb ram, CAD engineering grade 64 bit OS etc, so I do not think it is the CPU this time.
In the mix, everything sounds fine live through the monitors and the house PA.
Strange
 
Your best bet is to fix whatever's making the pops in the first place.

If you really need to fix it automatically in reaper, you can do it with compression.
If you want to do it the hard way in Reaper, you can do it with gates and side chain compression.

The easy way: Add a compressor to the channel, set it to only fire when the level spikes at those pops. Set the compression level to infinity. This will reduce the volume of the pops to the level of everything else.
The cool way: Make a copy of each track. In the copy, add a gate, set it to mute everything quieter than the pops. Open the routing panel and send its output to channels 3&4 of the original track and not the main bus. (this means that when you press play, you won't hear the copy track.) Add a compressor to the original track, make it's control input be the auxillary channels (3&4) set it to compress everything down to 0. This will mostly mute the pops.
 
Assuming this is not a hardware (mic/cable/connector,etc.) problem:

Are you recording everything to the boot drive???

Clicks and pops and dropouts can be caused by the drive not being able to keep up. Other apps or services can be taking away the computer's focus on laying down data, which is why dedicated audio drives are always recommended.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons and you're going to have to do some detective work to find out what's causing the problem.
 
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