Run effect or plugin on only a certain amplitude range?

[collen]

Hi all

I don't think this is possible, but am hoping I'm wrong!

I regularly clean up dialogue audio.  I use RX7's Mouth de-click as a VST3 plugin, first at a really conservative setting (Sensitivity set to 2) across the whole dialogue to pick up the worst mouth clicks - I find if I set this higher then I start to lose D and T sounds at the end of words.  Then I do a manual pass to remove indiviudual clicks and smacks.  This can be pretty tedious, so to make it as quick as possible, I have two favourites mapped to keyboard shortcuts - one Mouth de-click (sensitivity 10, frequency skew 0) to remove clicks, and another (sensitivity 10, frequency skew -9, click widening 5ms) to remove smacks and lower freq clicks.

When I get to spaces between sentences, if there are any clicks present I generally select the whole silence and use one or both of my favourites to remove them.  But it would be faster if I could somehow run these favourites across the whole audio file, but limit it to only process sections that are below a certain amplitude (maybe -40db).  This would save me some time and tedium on the manual pass, as I then only have to manually remove clicks and smacks within sentences.

Is this possible in some weird way?  There's no amplitude setting within RX's de-click module, so I guess I would need to team it up with another effect somehow, but I don't see how I can do that.  An effects rack?  Sidechain?

Alternatively, if there's a more efficient way to clean up mouth clicks, I'm all ears!

Many thanks in advance.

[ryclark]

Unfortunately there isn't an easy way (if any at all) to cause effects to only work on audio below a set level. The only exception being using an Expander setting in one of the Dynamics effects to reduce levels below a certain threshold. However I would have said that mouth clicks a -40dB compared to the dialogue peaks would really be noticeable to the normal audience.

If it is only small noises in the gaps in the dialogue then maybe one of the expander options would be the one to use. It might help us help you if you could post a clip from one one of your files in .wav format to somewhere like Dropbox or Google Drive for us to take a listen to.

[collen]

Hi ryclark

Thanks for your help, as always.

I'm not sure if you meant to write "wouldn't really be noticeable to the normal audience"?

I edit a lot of meditation recordings for a few different clients that are usually listened to on headphones, so to me mouth clicks around -40db are certainly noticeable and distracting in this use case.  To be honest tho, as I spent a lot of time editing dialogue for others and as a self-editing voice artist myself, its tough for me to be objective - I always hear mouth clicks in podcasts, on TV, etc, so maybe I'm just hyper-tuned to them.

Here's a dropbox link to one of the files I'm working on now: Dropbox - Pre Mouth De-Click.wav​ - you'll hear clicks at 2.5s, and a bunch between 7 and 9s, all of which are between sentences, and an example of what I would like to automate the removal of, without affecting the voice.

Also, I realise this sample has a lot of broadband noise - I remove this after the mouth click pass.  An expander after noise reduction would take me to almost digital silence (ie, gating) which isn't ideal.  I find this can make dialogue can sound unnatural.  Interested on your take on this.

Many thanks for your help!

[ryclark]

I did mean to write that but wasn't expecting the sort of intense clicks that you get in your recording. And I agree that in this case Expansion would not be at all ideal. A bit of room tone in the gaps is always required.

The most effective Audition tool seems to be the Click and Pop Eliminator in the Noise Reduction/Restoration menu. Set the FFT size to 1024 instead of Auto to remove the clicks (but not all mouth noises) from your posted clip. You may also have to Scan for All levels to match your recordings. It is a fairly processor intense procedure so may not be that quick depending on your PC's capabilities.