Digital Conversion Glitches

[Lunkhead]

Perhaps you've experienced something like this. You're listening to your recorded tracks, and somewhere in there you hear a digital pop/click, the sound of a big instantaneous jump in audio sample value. Likely what happened is that your analog to digital converters dropped some samples. I don't really know if that means that it just plain did not sample the audio those times, or did not output the samples to the computer, or if the computer somehow failed to actually write them to disk, or what.

The way I'm used to dealing with this really sucks. I have to listen very closely as I play brief portions of the audio over and over, maybe even solo-ing every track in order to figure out which tracks have the glitch too. I zoom in and zoom in until I ultimately find the obviously broken part of the track, with a glaring vertical line in the waveform. Then I go in and use the pencil tool to try to somehow smooth out the problem, which is sometimes harder than other times because it seems like the waveform has shifted phase during the dropped period, too.

Is there a better way to find and fix these problems? I'm curious about a better way using Cubase specifically, since that's what I use, or with a Mac compatible VST. I guess I'd be willing to try to open the file in another audio editor too, and fix the change and save the file.

You'd think it would be easy to write some kind of plug-in that could analyze an audio track and find all these spots right away. Also you'd think the plug-in could then try to automatically smooth out the waveform.

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