Tom,

Of course I would have worked with the source discs if they have been 
available to me. But sometimes you are given someone else's transfers and 
that's all you are going to get!

I tried something similar years ago, using a plastic paint (Hyplar) which I 
would apply very carefully in a very thin line, using a very small paint 
brush, onto the oxide surface over the area of the click.  This actually 
worked - it wouldn't totally remove the click but would reduce its level 
dramatically since the paint would effectively lift the tape off the 
playback head by a microscopic amount.

Of course, the computer allows us to isolate clicks with great accuracy and 
to lower them down to the level of the surrounding suface noise.  I do this 
all the time, but of course it doesn't always work, due to the nature of the 
underlying music at any given moment.  This is only one of several 
techniques which digital editing allows, especially when a stereo transfer 
is made of a mono recording.

Doug Pomeroy
Pomeroy Audio
--------------------------------------

>From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List              
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] De-clicking
>Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:31:01 -0400
>
>Hi Doug:
>
>Thanks for the further info. I had never heard of this oxide-scraping 
>technique until today.
>
>Now you have me curious, so a followup. How come you'd be working with old 
>tapes from Davies and Towers instead of their source disks? Are there cases 
>where an old disk-to-tape transfer is preferable to going back to the disk, 
>or is it more likely the case that the original disk is lost or destroyed?
>
>Finally, like I said I only did the tape method very little and have done 
>almost all of this kind of work in the computer. I learned from standing 
>over Art Shifrin's shoulder when he was working on some problematic disk 
>transfers. For loud ticks and pops in spoken word, it's usually OK to just 
>zoom in far enough to grab the microsecond of waveform and zap it. I was 
>surprised in one case that I zapped 50 such waveforms, spending a solid 4 
>hours at it, and it eliminated all of ... 1.5 seconds from the program 
>time! In a half-hour spoken-word program, this is undetectable. When it 
>comes to music, it's not so simple. I've found that human beings' own 
>time-counting is "musical" (ie non-robotic, ie imprecise) enough that some 
>of these ticks and pops can be zapped, especially in pauses. Where it 
>doesn't work is in percussion notes or even a fast stacatto (sp?) of any 
>acoustic instrument. Back when I first got into computer-aided audio, I 
>would select the tick/pop waveform and reduce its level to something lower 
>than the surrounding music and that usually made it quiet enough to not be 
>detrimental to the listening experience. Then Art taught me how to write 
>out short ticks and pops by learning how to recognize what the correct 
>waveform SHOULD be and simply writing it in using the pencil tool in 
>Soundforge. This works great with what I call a linear disturbance --  ie 
>when the needle doesn't jump the groove but merely rides over a scratch or 
>piece of crud or little vinyl zit. When the needle jumps the groove like 
>with a gouge or a big vinyl zit, all bets are off because there is no 
>underlying music to mimick. I try to avoid records in that bad shape but 
>sometimes you get 'em. After years of doing this, I've come to the 
>conclusion that the most natural-sounding solution is just reduce the pop 
>waveform to the level of the accompanying music. Any listener to a disk 
>transfer will know that the medium is mechanical and thus there will be 
>surface noises on even the best examples. That said, I'd love to see the 
>waveforms coming out of a laser turntable on similar surface injuries. I 
>would guess they'd be similar because a gouge or a big vinyl zit is a 
>manufacturing or handling error that actually destroys part of the groove, 
>so there can by fact be no underlying music to patch in. By the way, I know 
>a musician would cringe at this, but there have been a few cases where the 
>players so carefully replicate a phrase in its repeated passage that I've 
>been known to "loop" the undamaged phrase over where there was a bad 
>surface injury. The only time this has worked is when the phrase is 
>repeated so perfectly that there is no time-shift. Some musicians are 
>amazingly accurate with this, and yet don't sound robotic like a 
>synthesizer.
>
>-- Tom Fine
>
>----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Pomeroy" 
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 8:28 PM
>Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] De-clicking
>
>
>>Hi Tom,
>>
>>I assume the reference to "Jack" is a reference to Jack Towers.
>>He will tell you he got the oxide scraping technique from discussions
>>with the late John RT Davies. I have worked with some of John's tapes,
>>and I can report his scraping was VERY carefully done.  I have also worked
>>with some of Jack's tapes, and I have to say Jack usually took off too 
>>much
>>oxide, producing an obvious dropout; I had to fix lots of these, using
>>crossfades, or by careful deletion of part of the audible silence.
>>
>>doug pomeroy
>>
>>>From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
>>>Reply-To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List              
>>><[log in to unmask]>
>>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>>Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] De-clicking
>>>Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:52:44 -0400
>>>
>>>Hi Parker:
>>>
>>>I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were describing. Now I understand. 
>>>That would absolutely work, but what an art form! Wow, I wonder what Jack 
>>>experimented on to learn the art.
>>>
>>>-- Tom Fine
>>>
>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "Parker Dinkins" 
>>><[log in to unmask]>
>>>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>>Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 8:14 AM
>>>Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] De-clicking
>>>
>>>
>>>>on 7/26/07 8:06 PM US/Central, Tom Fine at [log in to unmask]
>>>>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>But if you do Jack's method, you're left with the same problem as Terry 
>>>>>-- a
>>>>>microsecond of blank space, which is just as noticeable and annoying as 
>>>>>the
>>>>>click.
>>>>
>>>>By scraping off only the precise moment of the click, you're in effect
>>>>creating a high speed fadeout and fade-in. It's audible, but less 
>>>>annoying
>>>>than the click itself.
>>>>
>>>>There's an overview of analog and digital de-clicking at
>>>>http://www.cedaraudio.com/intro/declick_intro.html - but without a
>>>>description of manually scraping off the oxide.
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>Parker Dinkins
>>>>MasterDigital Corporation
>>>>Audio Restoration + CD Mastering
>>>>http://masterdigital.com
>>>>
>>
>>_________________________________________________________________
>>http://liveearth.msn.com
>>

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