eliminating scratchy parts of speech

I know this is a somewhat old post but if you're still around I would love to know if you ever found and answer to your question.  I have been driven mad by it.  It's NOT clipping.   It happened at any point in the audio and it's so frustrating because I basically can't make a good recording anymore.  Any advice is appreciated.  

It sounds like you have some digital clipping here. This can be fixed in the future by turning the volume level of the mic input down while recording or, even better, running the microphone through a preamp with a compressor/limiter to stop these distoreted peaks.

I tested Window > Diagnostics > DeClipper (which would be the best effect for this) but it had little impact. The alternative is to run through the audio and clip out all these peaks. You can do it easily as long as you make a clean cut otherwise it'll sound edited. Switch on spectral frequency display and you'll be able to see all these clips as bright yellow lines.

I attached my attempt at removing the clips to show that it is possible 🙂

It would be a lot easier to figure out what might be a good solution if you could post a wav file with a couple of examples of the sound that haven't been treated at all. Screen grabs are all very well, but they don't translate into actual sound, and are accordingly of limited value. Whilst that certainly looks 'raspy', I can't tell how raspy it really is.

It's very unlikely that the click/pop eliminator will do anything to this, as that is designed to look for a particular characteristic of a waveform, and generally, spoken words don't contain it. I can think of several possibiliries, but really would need to hear a couple of representative samples first.