Allow me to divulge a Mincey family secrets. We have records. As in vinyl records that play on a turntable connected to the family room’s entertainment system.
Records? No, not CDs. Records. The kind of recording media that look like a black, squished Frisbee. It’s not that Mr. and Mrs. Mincey are such music aficionados that we require music technology from the last century. It’s just that we’re old and our record collection is one of the artifacts we keep around to help us irritate our children.
What’s the big deal about vinyl records? First of all, it’s a music collection we’ve already paid for and, thanks to the recording industry’s need to grow revenue, we paid for again by buying cassette tapes, then CDs, and, in some cases, digital downloads of the very same music.
Some say that vinyl records provide a better, warmer, more intimate and accurate sound than CDs or digital downloads from the iTunes Store. Maybe so, but neither CDs or iTunes music have clicks and pops, which seem to be the inherent domain of vinyl records.
Getting audio from vinyl records into your Mac is a multi-step process which involves connecting your record player to your Mac (best handled through the entertainment system’s output) and digitizing the audio. I prefer Amadeus Pro.
Once you’ve recorded the record to your Mac, how do you get rid of the clicks and pops? If you’re merely listening to a vinyl record, you don’t. But if you’ve recorded those records onto your Mac, there’s a handy Mac app called ClickRepair which helps to de-click and de-crackle the sound from vinyl records.
ClickRepair finds the clicks, pops, and crackles in your digitized vinyl recording and gives you tools to remove them with just a few, well, clicks.
The interface isn’t much to look at. The recording’s wave form is at the top with a more precise wave form below.
The main controls are Play, Fix, Accept, Resume and Abort. Slider controls turn DeClick and DeCrackle on or off, and slide to increase or decrease sensitivity.
You can control sound volume for each of the two stereo channels, and even move stereo tracks to mono. ClickRepair isn’t just for repairing digitized vinyl records, either. It works on any audio file embedded with clicks, pops, and crackles from damaged or poorly recorded audio.
Other than the bare bones interface, the only negative is that ClickRepair is a Java application (so it also runs on Windows PCs), and that means you’ll need to download Java to run on your Mac (and Java seems to have plenty of security issues these days).