Lawrence Ryan (whom you may know as the announcer of .NET Rocks!, Hanselminutes, and sometimes Mondays) was in the process of editing Hanselminutes #76 tonight when he hits a huge snag. The show was recorded thusly: Scott was on the phone with Robert Pickering talking about F#. Scott was recording his voice with a microphone, and so was Robert. Robert was using some kind of headset mic (as most people do) which was absolutely freaking out whenever he gave it a pop with a P or a T or even an F or S. Now, normal pops can be taken out with EQ, but in this case, the sound card recorded these nasty square waves that sound like crackling when played back.

Check out this sample from Robert's mic track. You can listen to the wav itself, and also click the image to enlarge it.

Click here to listen

Let's zoom into the clips right in the middle:

Sure looks nasty, huh?

Well, the only thing he could do is delete the clipped portions out. Fortunately, Adobe Audition does a good job of matching up the volumes of the samples on either side of the splice, so you don't get any popping from the edit.

He just zoomed right into it and selected the clip like so:

.... hit the delete key, and it's gone.

Listen to it again, with the clips taken out. Click here to listen.

After doing that edit, we still had to roll off the low end with a graphic EQ to get rid of the rumble.

Click here to listen to the final version.

Now, here's where we earn our keep. This audio file was riddled with these pops. There were at least 100 of them. It took hours to fix. In fact, he's still fixing it. But, when its all over we're hitting the all night diner for some grease and coffee. Something to look forward to.