Fixable? Voice recording with continuous cuts & pops

Audio Production
1

Hi all! I’m hoping someone here might be able to help me somewhat fix the issue I have encountered. I’m supposed to stream a video online this Friday with the effected audio and am HOPING I can find a solution to clean it up somewhat. Any and all ideas welcome.

Background: Three times a year I record over 8 hours of the final round of a photography competition. It’s a panel setup with three judges on camera with lav mic headsets. I use OBS to record each segment and then playback the video files online at a later date as part of a streaming event. After recording, I clean up the audio in Adobe Audition while using presets from Music Radio Creative.

Current issue: On day two of recording I foolishly didn’t re-check that everything was recording fine and for the first 1.5 hours the audio recorded (after passing through OBS) is in very rough shape. I have a VST 2 plugin (TDR Kotelnikov TDR Kotelnikov | Tokyo Dawn Records) that was on and I suspect the culprit for the continuous clicking and cutting/peaking of the audio.

Example Audio: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/3/folders/1wvSzdFLFJPcfinnUCFN-oSfuOsGhzHxi

There are two clip examples. The first is unprocessed and on the second clip (V2) I’ve applied two passes of deClicker both on heavy reduction. Then I applied Podcast Voice Preset.

I’m by no means an expert or well experienced but I am comfortable working in Audition.

Is there a solution out there to make the audio somewhat understandable? I know it’s pretty rough but I have no option to re-record. One thing I played with was adding an artificial stereo effect and it seemed to make understanding the audio a little easier.

Thanks in advance for any help with this!!

2

I’ll be honest I’d re-record.

If it’s not being streamed live via OBS then don’t use the PlugIns during recording and save them for post processing. The most important thing is to get good audio to be able to work with.

Sounds like either your computer processor was overworked or your hard drive was over worked with that amount of cuts and drops in the audio.

3

Thanks for your reply Mark. 100% agree about clean audio. In OBS it’s hard to see when a plugin is activated unless your looking for it, and I completely forgot to add it to my pre-record checklist. Bad mistake on my part. Really bad. We had also left OBS open overnight and just started up the next day without a re-start, which most likely caused an overworked processor/full cache issue.

I’d love to re-record but that was a one shot deal. I’ll be adding in some redundancy in the future based on this experience.

Do you know of any way to apply an effect in Audition in waves, or cyclically? I’m wondering if I can sync an effect to the rhythm of the cutting out to level out the audio a little.

Another option is adding in subtitles for this portion of the recording. Do you or anyone else know of good service for that?

Cheers!

4

Without downloading and looking at the file in detail in the waveform it’s tough to say whether anything is recoverable. If the audio isn’t there then there’s nothing you can do. If it is then the compression or the speech volume leveller may work but it would still be far from ideal.