How to reduce rain-noise pops in soundtrack

n-Track Studio Discussion Forum
1

How to reduce pops in soundtrack

2

Hi,

I am using nTrack-Studio to re-mix/edit the soundtrack
for a variety of Digital Video. One of my soundtracks
was recorded in the rain, and there are numerous
"pops" created by the raindrops hitting the mic or
lens hood or storm hood on the camera.

Can anyone recommend a good techniques for
reducing these pops? They’re really obvious in
the waveform graph, so I’ve got to believe there’s
a method to identify/reduce them. Using regular audio
equipment, I’d probably try a “limiter/expander”,
but I’m not clear what the equivalent in nTrack-Studio
would be.

Thanks for any help,
mTp

3

how about trying sonic foundry’s click remover plug-in. I’m in doubt though… but give it a try.

4

The rain noise is not unlike record pops, so software or plug-ins designed to clean up bad vinyl may be helpful.

There’s a tool I like called Pristine Sounds that has some good vinyl tools and has some interesting analysis and clean-up tools.

Straight notch EQ might help, if the raindrop noise frequencies are outside of the frequencies you want to keep. You can also try a noisegate to make a track consisting mainly of rain hits, then invert this and mix with original to subtract the rain hits from the track.

5

Many waveform editors have some form of filtering features. Try Goldwave (currently shareware v5.08) and try the Pop/Click filter in the Effect\Filter pulldown menu. If not that, then perhaps (or additionally) try the parametric EQ and/or banding filters, such as the aforementioned Notching. I’ve never had to filter out rain, so I don’t have any direct experience to hand out. G/L.

6

Good old Cool edit pro has some nice noise removal features also. If you have a pop that is recorded clean without anything else, it can be used as info of what to remove. I have used CEP to remove mic hiss with very nice results, I imagine it might work here too.

7

I’ve seen a colleague at work use cool edit to remove all sorts of noises even things such as a telephone ring.There is a spectral view where the offending noise can be easily seen and you can draw a box round it and remove it.
I works better than I would ever have imagined it could.

Nick

8

I had to deal with something similar on a spoken word project recently. The artist was sitting in a chair that made a noise when she shifted in it, also she hadn’t had breakfast and her stomach growled/gurgled ever once in a while. This wasn’t all that obtrusive while she was speaking, but there were a lot of quiet places between speaking parts where it was kind of jarring (the recordings were guided meditations).

I tried just silencing the track during those noises, but the original recording (not by me) wasn’t recorded very loud at all, and the noise floor was up quite a bit when played back at a good volume, so the sudden silence was jarring.

Instead, I found quiet places without the weird noises and copied them, and then pasted them over the offending noises. I then found myself getting audible pops at the edit points. I discovered that if I zoomed in on both the vertical and horizontal axis, I could easily see where the wave forms weren’t matching up, and I could shift the pasted-in section until it matched up. Presto, no popping noise.

Obviously, this is a very laborious way to remove noises, but it worked quite well, and the final product sounded a whole lot better than the original recording!

Cheers, Tim