Audio Repair and Restoration

How to fix crackle and clicks in a recording in REAPER

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published August 7, 2026 · Updated August 23, 2026

“Crackle” and “clicks” get used for a few different noises, and they do not all have the same fix. A single sharp tick at an edit point, a scatter of little pops across a take, a steady frying sound while you record, and a fuzzy tearing on the loud words are four separate problems. The good news is that telling them apart takes about a minute, and once you know which one you have, the right fix is usually simple and free.

This guide covers clicks and crackle that are unwanted noise in the signal. If your problem is broadband hiss or a steady electrical hum instead, those are different fixes: see how to reduce background noise in REAPER and how to remove hum from a recording.

First, find out what kind of crackle you have

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides everything. Play the crackly section three or four times and watch what the noise does.

Removing clicks that are baked into the file (stock REAPER)

For a handful of isolated clicks or pops recorded into the take, REAPER’s ordinary item editing is enough. There is no dedicated “declick” button, but you do not need one for a few of them.

1. Find the click

Zoom in hard on the spot. A click usually shows up as a sharp, thin vertical spike that breaks the smooth shape of the waveform. Zooming the waveform amplitude up can make it easier to see. Get close enough that you can see the individual wiggle of the wave, not just a solid block.

2. Split around it and let the fades do the work

Put the edit cursor just before the click and press S to split, then just after it and press S again. That isolates a tiny item, only a few milliseconds wide, sitting right over the click. When REAPER splits an item it adds a very short fade-out and fade-in at the new edges by default, and those little fades are exactly what smooths a click away. From here you can either delete that tiny sliver and nudge the neighboring edges together for a crossfade, or drag the two sides to overlap slightly so REAPER builds a crossfade across the gap. Keep the edit tiny. You are hiding a few thousandths of a second, not cutting out a word.

3. Or dip the volume over the click

An alternative that leaves the timing untouched is a fast volume dip. Show the item’s take volume envelope (or a track volume envelope with V), add points on either side of the click, and pull the level down hard for the couple of milliseconds the click occupies. Because the click is much louder and shorter than the voice around it, a brief dip can knock it down without you hearing the level move. This works best when the click sits in a gap or a quiet moment rather than on top of a sustained note.

Dense or continuous crackle: when stock REAPER is the wrong tool

Hand-editing works for a few clicks. It falls apart for vinyl-style crackle, a dropout that peppered a whole phrase with ticks, or hundreds of tiny pops, because you would be splitting all day. REAPER does not ship a dedicated declicker or decrackle plugin, so this is a case where the honest answer is to use a different, purpose-built tool and bring the result back.

The free option most people already have access to is Audacity, which is free and open source and has repair effects built for exactly this:

• Click Removal (Effect › Noise Removal and Repair › Click Removal) scans a selection and takes out scattered clicks and pops automatically. It needs a selection longer than about 4,096 samples, roughly a tenth of a second, to work.
• Repair handles one nasty click at a time by interpolating across a very short gap, up to 128 samples, from the audio on either side. It is the closest thing to a surgical redraw.
• Noise Reduction is the tool Audacity itself recommends for very soft, rapid, static-like crackle that Click Removal misses, the kind you hear on old vinyl transfers.

Export the cleaned file and drop it back onto your REAPER track. Paid repair suites do this with more finesse and better artifact control, and they are worth it if you clean up damaged audio often, but you do not need to spend anything to try the free route first.

Crackle that only happens while recording or playing back

If your test showed the crackle moving around, or it only appears live and disappears when you render, nothing is wrong with your file. Your audio device could not keep up in real time, so it dropped tiny pieces of the stream, and you hear those gaps as crackle or stuttering. This is a settings and performance problem, and no amount of editing will fix it because there is nothing damaged to edit.

The usual fixes, in order:

1. Raise the buffer (block) size. In Preferences › Audio › Device, step the block size up through the standard sizes, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 samples, until the crackle stops. A bigger buffer gives the computer more breathing room. The tradeoff is more monitoring delay, so raise it only as far as you need.
2. Use a proper low-latency driver. On Windows, an ASIO driver for your interface is far more stable than the generic options. This overlaps directly with monitoring latency, so the same settings that cause a headphone delay also cause playback crackle when they are wrong. See how to fix recording latency in REAPER for the full walkthrough of drivers and block size.
3. Lighten the CPU load. Heavy plugins, a very high sample rate, or background apps making sudden demands can all cause dropouts. Bypass plugins to test, and close anything that spikes the processor, like antivirus scans, backups, or updates, while you work. If the processor really is the bottleneck, how to lower CPU usage when REAPER spikes and stutters covers the Performance Meter, anticipative FX, and freezing tracks.
4. Unplug what you do not need. Other USB and Thunderbolt devices can interfere with an audio interface on the same bus. Disconnect anything not involved in the session and test again.

What this will not fix

Repair has real limits, and it is worth knowing them before you spend an hour on a lost cause.

• It will not rebuild a dropout. When the buffer failed during recording, actual samples were never written, so that slice of audio is simply gone. You can smooth the click at the seam, but you cannot recreate the words that were never captured. The only real fix for dropouts is to prevent them, using the buffer and CPU steps above, then record again.
• It will not repair heavy clipping. Crackle that is really clipping distortion means the peaks were flattened on the way in, and a declicker cannot restore a shape that was never recorded. That is a separate problem with its own honest limits in the clipped audio guide.
• It cannot make a rough recording pristine. Removing clicks makes a good take usable again. It will not turn a noisy, distorted phone recording into a clean studio one.

If it still crackles

A quick order to work through when the noise is not going away:

1. Re-run the test. If you have been editing and the crackle is still there, confirm again whether it repeats in the same spot. You may be fixing a baked-in click when the real problem is playback, or the reverse.
2. Your edit is too wide. If a split fix left an audible glitch or a chopped word, you removed too much. Undo and isolate a smaller slice, just the spike itself.
3. The declicker is too aggressive. If the file now sounds dull or watery, lower the tool’s sensitivity and process a lighter amount, or only the affected selection instead of the whole track.
4. It is a different noise. Steady frying that never stops is more likely hiss or hum than crackle, and those have their own methods. Continuous low buzz points to an electrical or grounding issue at the source, which is better solved before the next take than after.