A common problem of old vinyl recordings are the pops and cracks that are caused by scratches in the disk. Provided that they are isolated and that there are not too many of them, such cracks can be eliminated in a very efficient way by Amadeus Pro.
In order to eliminate a single isolated crack, proceed as follows. First, find the location of the crack in your sound and zoom into it. A crack can usually be spotted visually as a spike in the waveform. Then, select the entire crack and choose Interpolate in the Effects menu. Alternatively, you can also just hit the [r] key. Make sure that you select a piece of sound that is as short as possible. Ideally, you want to select only one isolated crack and nothing else. If a too long piece of sound is selected, Amadeus Pro will complain and refuse to apply this function.
If a sound contains many cracks, and in order to have more control over the repairing, you can use the Repair Centre tool accessible from the Windows menu. This shows a zoomed display of the waveform of the current track. One convenient feature of this display is that it is always scaled vertically in such a way that the whole height of the display is being used. This allows you to see the waveform accurately even if it has a low amplitude. The small blue knob at the top of the display allows you to scroll through the waveform, the position of the knob determines the speed of the scrolling. If a location in the waveform looking like a crack is found, you can determine whether it really is a crack in the following way. First click on Preview original which plays a short section of sound (about one second) containing the current selection. If this section contains a crack, click on Preview repaired which plays exactly the same section, but with the selected portion repaired. If this provides a satisfactory result, click on Repair in order to apply the repair to the sound. If it doesn’t produce any audible improvement, it may be possible that the real crack is located slightly after or before the current location.
The Find next function looks for the first crack following the current location. This function may return false positives (locations that look like cracks to Amadeus Pro but that are in fact not), so you should always manually verify any crack found using this function.
The repair centre window obeys to a number of handy key shortcuts that are summarised in the following table:
| key | action |
| [r] | Repairs the current selection |
| [shift][r] | Repairs the current selection and finds the next crack |
| [t] | Repairs the top channel of the current selection |
| [shift][t] | Repairs the top channel of the current selection and finds the next crack |
| [b] | Repairs the bottom channel of the current selection |
| [shift][b] | Repairs the bottom channel of the current selection and finds the next crack |
| [o] | Preview original sound |
| [p] | Preview repaired sound |
| [n] | Finds the next crack |
| [z] | Undoes the last action |
| [shift][z] | Redoes the last action |
The basic sound repair functions are also available with simple key shortcuts from the main sound window, even if the TEXT MISSING!
