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Finding Similar Events

The spectral editing mode makes it easy to isolate a single unwanted sound in time and frequency. Unwanted sounds rarely occur only once, though — a camera auto-focus beep, a chair squeak or a recurring click will usually appear again and again throughout the recording. The Find Similar Event tool searches the clip for further occurrences of the sound you have already selected, so that you can repair all of them in one operation.

Using Find Similar Event

  • Select the unwanted sound you want to use as the reference. Use whichever selection tool suits the sound best (see Selections in Time and Frequency).

  • Choose Find Similar Event... from the Selection sub menu in the Edit menu.

  • The Find Similar Event window appears with a Tolerance slider and the buttons Prev, Next and Find All.

Find Similar Events window

Acoustica scans the clip using your selection as the reference. Below we can see that Acoustica has found 5 similar events, shown by the light colored rectangle in the center of the screenshot below:

Find All result

Parameter Settings

  • Tolerance (0 % to 100 %)

The tolerance controls how closely a sound has to resemble the reference before it counts as a match. Low values only find events that are very similar to the reference, whereas high values also accept events that differ more. The default setting is 50 %. If a search returns too few matches, raise the tolerance; if it returns events you did not intend to process, lower it.

  • Prev and Next

Moves the selection to the previous or the next match in the recording. The selection keeps the shape, size and channel assignment of your original selection and is simply repositioned onto the match, so you can step through the occurrences one by one and repair each of them with the Retouch tool or AudioFill.

The search wraps around: clicking Next on the last match returns you to the first one.

  • Find All

Selects every match in the recording at once. Any process you apply then affects all the occurrences in a single step, which is by far the quickest way to remove a repeating noise.

Notes

The scan is made once, from the selection that was active the first time you clicked one of the buttons. If you change the selection or edit the clip, Acoustica discards the scan and searches again the next time you click Prev, Next or Find All.

The tolerance is read every time you click a button, so you can adjust the slider and click Find All again without closing the window.