How to Remove Clicks From a Recording

A vinyl transfer has 318 clicks in four minutes. A voice recording has mouth clicks before every third sentence. A digital capture has two dropouts where the interface glitched.

All three are the same class of problem — a few milliseconds of damage in an otherwise fine recording — and they need a different tool from the one that removes hiss.

Declicking and noise reduction are different jobs

Declicking finds short transient damage and rebuilds those samples from what surrounds them. It touches a few milliseconds at a time and leaves everything else untouched.

Noise reduction attacks continuous background — hiss, hum, room tone — across the entire file. It works on the whole signal and always costs something in the process.

A vinyl transfer usually needs both, in that order: repair the clicks first, then reduce the surface noise underneath. Doing it the other way round makes the clicks harder to detect, because noise reduction smears their edges.

Using noise reduction to remove clicks is the common mistake, and it produces a recording that is duller and still clicks.

Why interpolation works

A click is a discontinuity — a few samples that do not belong. The audio either side of it is intact and highly predictable over such a short span.

So the repair is to discard the damaged samples and reconstruct them from the surrounding waveform. Over a millisecond or two, the reconstruction is close enough to be inaudible.

That is why short clicks vanish completely and long dropouts do not. A 50 millisecond gap has to be rebuilt from material much further away, and the prediction degrades quickly. Long dropouts are patchable rather than repairable.

Sensitivity, and the drums problem

A detector looks for sharp transients. A snare hit is a sharp transient.

Set sensitivity too high and percussion gets flattened — the attack is treated as damage and interpolated away. The result is a recording with no clicks and no impact, which is a worse trade than the clicks.

Start at medium and listen specifically to the percussion. If the drums have lost their edge, lower the sensitivity and accept that a few clicks survive. Those can be repaired individually.

On spoken word this is less of a risk, but plosives and hard consonants can trigger the same problem.

Work on a copy, at full resolution

Restoration is destructive, and the decisions are hard to reverse once mixed down.

Keep the original untouched and process a copy. Interpolation rebuilds samples, and a repair that seemed fine at the time frequently sounds over-processed a week later — at which point you want the source back.

Work at the file’s native sample rate and bit depth rather than a converted version. Each conversion is a small loss, and a restoration chain that resamples twice has degraded the material it was meant to improve.

For a vinyl transfer specifically, capture at a high resolution, do the restoration there, and convert down only at the final export. That ordering costs disk space and nothing else.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Running noise reduction to fix clicks, which dulls the recording and leaves them.
• Setting sensitivity high enough to catch every click and flattening the transients.
• Processing the whole file at one setting when the damage is concentrated in one section.
• Declicking after noise reduction rather than before.
• Not comparing against the original — heavy restoration is easy to over-apply when you have been listening to it for an hour.

How to do it with Audio Click and Pop Remover

The Audio Click and Pop Remover repairs transients in the browser.

1. Load the audio and choose the damage type, since vinyl crackle, dropouts and mouth clicks have different signatures.
2. Start at medium sensitivity.
3. Listen to the percussion and the consonants specifically, not just the repaired clicks.
4. Follow with noise reduction if there is continuous hiss underneath — that is a separate pass.

Other browser-only audio tools are in the tools directory.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between declicking and noise reduction?

Declicking rebuilds a few milliseconds of transient damage. Noise reduction works on continuous background noise across the whole file. Vinyl usually needs both, with declicking first.

Why did it damage my drums?

Because a sharp transient looks like a click to a detector set too sensitive. Lower the sensitivity and repair the remaining clicks individually, or process a selection that excludes the percussion.

Can every click be removed?

Short ones, usually invisibly, because the surrounding samples predict what was there. A long dropout has to be reconstructed from further away and the repair becomes audible.

Final thought

Declick first, then reduce noise, and check the drums before the clicks. Restoration that removes the damage and the life is not an improvement.

Try the free Audio Click and Pop Remover