How do you identify clicks and pops in a spectral analysis?

Question

I'm not a music guy, but I do use Adobe Audition from time to time for noise removal from interviews. I'm working with some particularly bad audio digitized from old audio-graph recordings, which is a bit too much for the automatic noise reduction processes in Audition. I'm trying to learn how to make use of the spectral analysis, but I don't really know how to distinguish good audio from bad audio.

The audio I'm working with has lots of pops and crackles, how do I identify them in the spectral analysis below?

Answer 1

In addition these spectral characteristics for clicks/pops, in your audio, localize some of your pop/crackle sounds by ear and scrub over them in the timeline, while looking at the spectrogram. You'll soon be able to pick out the anomalies visually.

You may also need to tweak your "spectrogram" view settings to show these artifacts more clearly.

Answer 2

Welcome to SD.

I think you might be placing too much importance on what this can do for you. Looking at what you have there, a lot of the noise floor is just broadband noise, I assume that came from the transfer medium. Clicks will show up as vertical lines when zoomed in, but pops and crackles are less easy to spot - especially amongst all that noise.

I don't work solely in audio restoration, but I do use noise reduction software for de-noising dialogue fairly regularly. Audition's tools are good, but Izotope RX is pretty much the standard in affordable noise reduction these days. You could try that, watch a few tutorials on YouTube and see if you get better results. Looking at what you have there though, you are never going to get close to anything pristine, just a reduction in noise is all you can hope for.