Originally, this was going to be a one page article. Well into the project, it was found to be getting to be a large file. In order to reduce download time and make specific information easier to find, it was decided to break the single page into four parts. With our prolific use of graphics, shorter articles will most definitely download faster. With a section for each program and one for device configuration, it will be quicker and easier to determine whether a specific problem has been addressed in this series. After some reader feedback, two more sections were added to this series, a FAQ and the Printing File Lists article.
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When you have finished recording your LP, you will be ready for step two, removing the album's pops and clicks. To accomplish this task Xitel has provided a program produced by a different software company than the one that produced LPRecorder and LPRipper. This program is Wave Corrector De-Click and is really only a small part of the much larger program Wave Corrector by Ganymede Test & Measurement. If interested you can find out more on the Ganymede Test & Measurement web site. With that said we'll dive into the part of the program provided by Xitel on the INport installation CD. As mentioned previously in this series, the program installs from the CD for both Windows XP and Windows Vista.
Here is the screen you will be faced with when you start the Wave Corrector De-Click
program. The two arrows labeled 1 point to the controls that provide this program
with target files. You can "drag" a file from an explorer window and "drop" it into
the list box indicated by the left arrow or you can use the "Add" button to navigate
to your file to add it to the list box. Whichever method you choose, you can add
as many files as you like which comes in handy if you don't use the default filename.
As one might expect, the more files you add the longer it will take for the program
to finish its task.
Once files have been added, the "Start" and "Remove" buttons below the "Add" button
become activated. The "Remove" button will take files off the list of files to be
processed. Pressing the "Start" button begins the de-click process. When the process
is finished the "Cancel" button label changes to "Done". Pressing this button will
close the program. The output of this program will have "cor" appended to the filename.
The default "record.wav" becomes "recordcor.wav".
Arrow 2 indicates the threshold slider. The more damaged your album the higher you
should set this control. The default setting of 3 seems to work well on most albums.
No matter how well cared for the album, by now it has attracted a considerable amount
of dust. A threshold setting of 1 should probably be reserved for albums that have
never been played.
Arrow 3 brings attention to a combo box entitled "File Type for Saving". If you follow the manual instructions the only choice you will have here is to save the output as a wave file. This program will do encoding as well as de-clicking and is preconfigured to use the same encoders as LPRipper. Audio encoding is a subject that is well beyond the scope of this series and will perhaps be tackled at a later time. Due to the nature of the compression techniques used for mp3s, a little of the original quality is lost each time a task is performed and the music re-encoded. For this reason, the best practice is to save encoding for the very last step. This reduces the amount of quality loss.
At this point, you have learned enough to de-click your recorded file. This process can be monitored in the box below arrows 2 and 3. When completed you will see "Done" in this box. The "Cancel" button in the upper portion of the program window also changes to a "Done" button. Since this is all that is covered in the manual about Wave Corrector De-Click, we will cover some additional features and short comings here.
Wave Corrector De-Click has the typical top line menu "Help" item for this size program. Unfortunately, the "About Wave Corrector" item is the only selection that functions when used on Windows Vista. The help files use winhlp32.exe, which is not supported by Vista. This is the short coming to which I alluded. Fortunately, the help files for this partial program contain very little useful information.
Shown here is the "Options" item of the top line menu. It too only has two selections, however, both function in Vista as well as Windows XP. Since the help files are dysfunctional with Vista, we will look closer at these "Option" items.
The "Save Options" window is so small there was barely room for arrows without covering up one of the functions. At arrow 1 is the combo box you use for "File Naming". You have the option of using the original name or adding "cor" to the original name. Arrow 2 points to the radio buttons that tell the program in which folder to save the de-clicked file. If you chose "User Defined" the browse button permits you to navigate to the folder of your choice or you can just type it into the text box below the radio buttons. For safety reasons, I choose to append "cor" to the original filename and save the output file to another folder.
If you decide to have Wave Corrector encode your music files and wish to use a codec other than those suggested by Xitel, you will need to use this screen to configure it. The "Path to encoder" combo box will only list encoders stored in the same folder as Wave Corrector De-Click otherwise use the browse button to navigate to the location of the encoder you have chosen to use. If you are using the suggested encoders they will be automatically configured for you and you need only decide which one you are going to use prior to de-clicking. For use of other encoders you need the parameters it requires. Wave Corrector needs the tokens "%IN", which gets replaced by the input filename and "%OUT", which gets replaced with the output filename. The parameters go into the combo box marked "Command Line Parameters". The windows media audio encoder will have something like this in the combo box "-input %IN -output %OUT -a_setting 160_44_2" without the quotes. The file extension will need to go into the combo box labeled "File Extension". Remember to click the "OK" button and you are ready to finish step two, although if you are using Wave Corrector for encoding you should use LPRipper to separate the tracks first, in which case this becomes your last step because LPRipper will only accept .wav file inputs.
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