CoolEdit96/2000 plug-ins

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CoolEdit96/2000 plug-ins

Last update: Feb. 14th, 2000

	NB. If you are using CoolEdit 2000 and have downloaded any plug-ins prior to Nov.15 1999, please download them again - the previous versions won't work properly with CoolEdit2000.
		Story
		Downloads
		Manuals
		Freeware
		Update History

The Story

ome time ago I started transferring some of my vinyl albums to CD. A few of them are either not reissued on CD or are hard to find; some other I just wished to listen to in the car, and today it's almost easier to do the "car copy" on a CD-R than on a cassette, to say nothing of the quality and durability of the former compared to that of the latter.
So far, so good. But here lies the problem. With cassettes, you can basically do nothing after copying. With digital files stored on a hard drive, you can do a lot.
It starts with "let me find that click and get rid of it". Then, after removing that click you start hearing a few other ones that somehow escaped your attention before that. And, of course, you just have to edit out those, too. After all, it's just 3-4 clicks more, so, even if you spend some time with every one of those, still, you didn't spend too much of it. But then, of course, you start hearing a few more clicks that didn't bring attention to themselves in presence (now eliminated) of those bigger clicks.
This is it. From now on you are obsessed, hooked and spend way too much time on those things.

W

hat's one to do? First, to save myself some time, I started looking for the ready solutions. Soon I discovered that, first, I am not ready to pay $300-$400 for the "serious" programs and second, none of the "shareware" or "freeware" programs produced any good results. And editing out the clicks totally manually is the long and bothersome task.
But fortunately, as it happened, Syntrillium corporation - the producers of CoolEdit96 and CoolEdit Pro - provided their C SDK on their Web site (free!), and their API happened to be quite easy to understand and use. So, being professional programmer, I decided to make my own plug-ins for CoolEdit96 that would facilitate things for me.
Here you see the results.

By the way, after publishing this page I was asked by someone to help with their own plug-in writing. So I decided to put some small guide "How to begin writing your own plug-ins" here, too. It's aimed at programmers only.
Another "by the way" - after I had already written my plug-ins, I've found a couple of more or less reasonably priced automatic de-clickers. They still don't provide 100% cleaning, but it's possible to produce more or less good results with those. One is Sound Laundry by Algorithmix (their descratcher plug-in costs $99), another one - ClickFix by Jeffery Klein ($30). I even bought the latter one and I even use it sometimes (the former one is better at eliminating small crackle (not an easy task, by the way), but still somewhat pricey).

The Downloads

ownload the appropriate ZIP, unzip it and put it's contents into your CoolEdit96 directory (e.g. "C:\Program files\Syntrillium\Cooledit"). When you start CoolEdit next time, you will see the menu item "Do Line..." and/or "Find Click..." and/or "DeClip..." depending on what you've downloaded.
See manuals below to find out how to use these things.

Do Line Last update: Nov. 15th, 1999	Find Click Last update: Feb. 14th, 2000	DeClip Last update: Feb. 14th, 2000
Click elimination by filling its place with the linearly interpolated points. Well, almost linearly - there's some smoothing at the ends.	Search for the possible click(s). Shows user the place where the click is suspected and the way it would be repaired if user approves. User has the ability to adjust the repair zone and mode, to stop in particular place in order to do something with it in the main CoolEdit window, and to adjust the parameters of the click search. Also, it's possible to run this plug-in in totally automatic search-and-repair mode. I'd not recommend it, though, until you play with the plug-in a little to get some understanding of what it does in various situations.	Rounding off the clipped samples. Helps to reduce the unpleasant distortion that occurs if the track was recorded too "hot". Of course, it's best to re-record such track at somewhat lower recording level, but sometimes it's impossible, and this plug-in may help.

The Manuals

ell, I'll certainly make some proper manuals when I have more time. Meanwhile, here are a few starting words (it is supposed that after reading those you'll be able to figure out yourself what to do):

1. All plug-ins work on a selected part of the waveform in one channel of 16-bit data.
For CoolEdit96, 16 bits is maximum resolution.
CoolEdit2000 automatically converts 32-bit data to 16 bits to pass to plug-in and then converts the results back to 32 bits; so it's possible to use plug-ins on 32-bit waveforms, but you may lose some precision. On 16-bit waveforms, no precision loss will happen.

2. To use the "Do Line" plug-in, select the click area plus a couple of points around (you'll have to zoom in to the click first). Then select "Transform / Do Line..." menu item, and the click area will be substituted with linear interpolation. Just try it and see - it is really much simpler than I can explain it here in words.

3. Typically, you'd want to use the "Find Click" plug-in in situation where you hear a click (or several clicks) in some small area of the waveform but cannot easily locate it.
Select that area (one channel only) and select "Transform / Find Click..." menu item. See what happens.
When something looking like click is found, you'll see the dialog box showing it to you. There are some controls to adjust the way it will be repaired, to zoom in/out etc. Most of them should be obvious. Couple of the less obvious things is explained below.

4. First, the parameters that control sensitivity of the click detector. Those are C1, Dist1 and C2. All you have to know about them is that the bigger they become, the less clicks will be found, and vice versa. Big sensitivity has a drawback, though - it will find many places that really are not clicks. The default values (4, 600, 9) seem to be a good compromise, at least for the kind of vinyl albums I had transferred thus far.
The reasonable ranges of those values to experiment with would be, respectively, 2..6, 100..800 and 4..12. Outside of those ranges you won't see much of a change.

5. [new] There is a new helpful control: "Base Frequency Verification". It's hard to explain how it works, but the main thing to know is: it tries to reject some "possible clicks" based on the analysis of it's surroundings. The bigger the value of "Severity", the stronger the rejection becomes, but at the same time the probability of rejecting the genuine clicks increases. I found that the value of severity in the range of 2..4 doesn't seem to reject many genuine clicks, but it does reject quite a number of the false ones, thus speeding up the work.

6. The final dialog - "Viewing Range" is actually CoolEdit96's own dialog (accessible regularly through "View / Viewing Range..." menu item). I use it as a trick to make CoolEdit to zoom in exactly on the found click area. If you need to zoom in, press "OK" in that dialog, otherwise press "Cancel" - it will affect only viewing, not the possible repair work that has been done. [new] Recently I found that due to improved click repair features of "FindClick" dialog I almost never need the "Viewing Range" dialog anymore, so I added a possibility to switch it off.

7. The "Find Click" plug-in actually changes the waveform only if you press "Repair" or "AutoRepair" buttons. Otherwise no changes to the original waveform will be done in spite of CoolEdit showing the file as "changed" after running this plug-in.

Freeware

ll plug-ins on this page are free to download and use. You have no obligations to me whatsoever.

But I have a small suggestion.

It would be interesting to know where do people learn about my plug-ins; so could you please spare a few seconds of your time to drop me a line with two words about it?

Update History

Feb. 14th, 2000

- [DeClip] better tolerance for cases when your ADC device dithered the clipping samples. For example, my Turtle Beach Fiji, when producing 16-bit output, dithers it from 20-bit original samples, thus making the clipped samples to differ noticeably from the clip value, and the older version of DeClip sometimes was fooled by the result - it didn't "see" the clipped area.
- [FindClick] minor bug fixed: When asked not to use the "Base Frequency Verification", in some rare cases the plug-in would still use it.

Dec. 14th, 1999

- [FindClick] added a few convenience features (view autozoom; turn off the "Viewing Range" dialog on exiting)
- [FindClick] added the new control, called "Base Frequency Verification", which rejects many false click findings (depending on user settings), thus allowing to work faster

Dec. 8th, 1999

- [FindClick] fixed the rare crash that sometimes could occur if the selection was less than 40 samples
- [FindClick] added keyboard shortcuts for frequently used buttons

Nov. 15th, 1999

- [all] changed to be compatible with CoolEdit 2000 which was released a few days before

	Good luck!
	Copyright 1999, Evgueni Tchetchetkine Mail to zhenyach@livejournal.com