When editing message audio, especially for use in video, it is often necessary to remove lip smacks and other loud clicks without changing the total time of the message. This can be a very time consuming and difficult problem at best.

If you do not care if the time is shortened, then you simply highlight the offending sound and press the delete key. But even if shortening the time is not a problem, sometimes these annoying clicks, like from a cell phone or infrared signals from some remote controllers, will be right in the middle of a word. The click removal tool can be used to remove clicks without making very much, if any, discernible change to the word being spoken by the speaker.

Here is how it works.

First lets help you locate the button. In the following screen shot the button is just under the "Fa" in "Favorites" on the menu line (highlighted in red). There are two click removal buttons, the one we will use is the one to the right, directly to the left of the “Restore clipped audio” button that I use rather frequently.

Notice I have highlighted a loud click and a small one to the right of it. The best results are obtained when there is a fair amount of noiseless background on both sides of the highlighted click within the highlighted area and on both sides outside of the highlighted area. The longest duration of sound you can select can be as much as 0.500 seconds. In older versions of Cool Edit, the longest duration was approximately 0.001 seconds!

So, highlight the click as see here:

Now push the remove click button to get to this dialogue box:

If the dialogue box does not look this this, you have pushed the wrong button. Try the button just to the right of the one you tried and it will probably be the one that make this dialogue box open.

Notice the button that says Fill Single Click Now. That is the button you press. The process takes a second or so. You will see this progress box:

After the process is complete, the screen will look like this:

Perfect. The click was removed with no time lost or gained in the message.

Also, you can assign a key combination to complete this action without the dialogue box. If you have many clicks to remove, as I often do, I have assigned the letter "z" on my keyboard to be the shortcut key that runs replaces the F3 key in repeating a command without running the dialogue box. By using "z" and the space bar (for starting and stopping the play of the file as I look for clicks to remove) with my left hand and the mouse for highlighting in my right hand, I am now able to remove hundreds of these clicks in a message without loosing or gaining any time in the sound track of the video in fraction of the time it used to take me.

Now for some very tricky cleanup. During the word outwardly there is a clicking sound in the word. Here is a link to hear before and a link to hear after the click is removed.

You may need headphones to hear the difference. Since some may be listening on headphones, even noise-canceling headphones on an airplane, it seems appropriate to remove these potentially distracting clicks.

Here is the screen shot of the entire word before any removal of the click:

The offending click is two small spikes in the small set of waves on the right.

Here is a blowup of that section with the offending area highlighted:

Here is the same section after the single click removal tool is used. Notice it removes more than a single click, it will do multiple clicks like the two clicks in this section. In this case they are not completely removed, but enough is removed so that the sound of the click in the word is gone.