Audacity software.

[Dorsetmike]

Click removal with Audacity

Some prominent clicks on an Audacity trace of an old Vinyl

Use the magnify tool to expand the portion to show just one click

Higlight it with the select tool, note the time above the trace, the highlighted part is much less than 0.01 of a second,
and as such, to all intents and purposes, removing it has no noticeable effect to the ear.

Press the delete Key on your keyboard and the highlighted aerea goes

Repeat for all the bad clicks, play through and listen for any others and note the track time(s) and treat as above.

 

[Charlie90]

Start your own music editing and recording in your pc, applying effects as desired, and mixing down the tracks into the final result by using FlexiMusic Audio Editor. This will help you.

 

[Alistair]

Yeah ive used Audacity aswell, we first learnt about it in about maybe year 7/8, its really good for editing allthough when i tried recording instruments onto another layer it was a bit delayed

 

[Soubasse]

For freeware, Audacity is really a very good program considering what it can do in terms of effects, processing and even multitracking (but the latter will depend on your processor).

Good post by Mike up there earlier in regard to editing pops and clicks out of old vinyl recordings, although I would also suggest out that it's often a good idea to make your cuts so that the waves join back together at a zero crossing (ie, the point where the wave crosses the centre line) as this can also avoid unwanted clicks.

And whilst it is possible to record via the audio input of your soundcard, always check the file afterwards for DC offset. It's easy to spot when the audio wave is not properly centered along the 0 line (literally "offset"). Some older or cheaper soundcards will cause this and it produces an often annoying hum on playback. Thankfully, it can be easily corrected in Audacity using the Normalise function which has the option to correct DC offset to 0.

The phase inversion in Audacity is very useful (among other things) for removing vocals from songs (for your own karaoke tracks if you're really into that sort of thing!)

Matt