Removing Mouth Smacking

[jennifer40348447]

I'm trying to figure out how to remove - not avoid, it's already been recorded - mouth smacking from my recording. It's easy for me to do at the very end of a sentence, but when it's in the middle I've found it nearly impossible. I've tried going to the waveform to discern what looks different, but haven't been able to make it work that way without erasing too little or too much. Online I saw someone using the FFT filter for those noises that escape with some letters, but that also didn't help with this saliva issue. Help!!! 

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

They aren't all the same, and some aren't so easy to get rid of. If you post a sample, I can try to indicate where they are...

[jennifer40348447]

Thanks Steve! Here's a five second clip with two smacks: https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/ef1d2a9d-b8a1-42f7-478c-3cab7ad42670 I can upload a longer one if that's too short, or if there's another way I should upload that works better, please let me know!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

In order to see them, you really need to optimise the spectral display - you need to be zoomed in quite a way, and also have the spectral FFT size optimised. The way you do that is to hold the Ctrl+Shift keys down, and then use the up and down keys until it's sharpest (or right-click on the frequency scale, and you can do it from there as well, but it's a lot more effort). The other thing that makes them a bit clearer is to normalize your waveform so that the peaks hit 0dB. What you will see then is something like this:

This is just before the word 'not' in the first sentence. Those two peaks I've circled are the smacking noise. If you put the marquee tool around them, and arrange playback so that it only plays the selection, then it becomes pretty clear as to where they are. In order to get this to play just the selection properly, you may have to turn off scrubbing if it's set to play - I certainly do on this laptop. How you get rid of them is up to you. If you higlight each, and use the Auto Heal favorite, they will go. To minimise the artifacts if you do that, you should use the normal Time Selection tool and select the entire frequency band - the marquee tool is good for identifying them, but Auto Heal is optimised to work on a whole-band selection.

If you've got a lot of these to do, it's going to take a while...

[jennifer40348447]

Thanks Steve! I'm going to try this tomorrow when I have time to play around. Related question - are you able to slow down the play for editing to really distinguish where something happens? I know you can speed up or down all/part of the file, but if I just want to slo-mo the playback for editing, is there an easy tool?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

If you go to Edit>Preferences>Playback, you'll find that you can program the j, k and l keys to shuttle at half speed in either direction. Well not the k - that just stops it! Repeated presses of either the j or l keys will speed it up in either direction.