Podcast and Spoken-Word Audio
How to remove mouth clicks and lip smacks in REAPER
Published September 14, 2026
Mouth clicks and lip smacks are very short, fairly quiet ticks made by saliva and lips separating, and a close mic hears every one of them. There is no stock REAPER plugin that strips them out automatically, so the reliable method is to find each one and reduce it rather than delete it. Clicks sitting in a gap between words come down with a take volume envelope or a tiny cut. Clicks sitting on top of a word need a spectral edit. REAPER 7.80, released September 13, 2026, also added an Edit → Repair Pops/Clicks dialog that hunts for clicks for you, which is worth trying first. This is editing work, not a one-knob fix, but the result is usually clean.
If you record spoken word close to a microphone, you will eventually hear them: small wet ticks, clicks and smacks between words, especially at the start of a sentence or after a pause. They are not a fault in your interface and they are not a bad microphone. They are the sound of your own mouth, captured by a mic that is close enough to hear it.
They are also the reason a lot of people end up shopping for expensive repair software. The usual answer online is iZotope RX and its Mouth De-click module, which works well but costs real money. One typical forum post puts it plainly: RX Advanced is "over my budget, especially if getting it just for the mouth noise removals." That is a fair question, and the honest answer is that REAPER on its own can get you most of the way there. It just asks for your time instead of your money.
What a mouth click actually is
A mouth click is a tiny burst of sound made when saliva bridges and then breaks between the tongue, lips or palate. A lip smack is the bigger cousin of the same thing. Three characteristics matter for fixing them:
- They are short. Most last a few milliseconds. At normal zoom you will not see them in the waveform at all.
- They are mostly high frequency. A click is a fast transient, so its energy sits well above the fundamental of the voice. That is what makes a spectral edit possible.
- They are one-off. No two clicks are identical, and there is no steady version of the sound to learn from. This matters more than it sounds, and it rules out a whole family of tools below.
Dry mouth, dairy, talking after a long silence and sitting very close to the mic all make them worse. So does a bright condenser aimed straight at your mouth.
Find them before you fix them
You cannot edit what you cannot see. Set REAPER up so the clicks become visible, then work through the take once.
Make the track tall and zoom in hard
Drag the track taller and zoom in until you are looking at a fraction of a second. Clicks show up as narrow spikes that do not belong to any word.
Turn on the spectrogram
Right-click the media item and look under Spectral edits for the option to show the spectrogram. The same display controls live globally in View → Peaks Display Settings. In spectrogram view, time still runs left to right, but the vertical axis is frequency and colour shows level. A mouth click appears as a thin bright vertical stripe in the upper part of the picture.
Listen with the low end out of the way
If you are not sure whether a spike is a click or a consonant, put a temporary high-pass filter on the track set high, around 2 kHz, and play the section. The voice mostly disappears and the ticks stand out. Remove the filter before you edit anything.
Do one pass for the loud, obvious smacks and stop there. Play the result at normal listening volume. Very often the quiet ticks that looked alarming on screen are inaudible once the obvious ones are gone, and chasing them is wasted time.
Try the Repair Pops/Clicks dialog first
REAPER 7.80, released on September 13, 2026, added a dedicated click-repair dialog at Edit → Repair Pops/Clicks. According to the Cockos changelog it lets you interactively find pops and clicks and apply sample-edit spectral repair, and the same update added actions to jump to the next and previous detected click. If you are on an older REAPER, updating is free within your licence and takes a minute.
Two honest caveats. First, the feature is aimed at pops and clicks in general, not specifically at mouth noise, so it will not necessarily flag every saliva tick in your take. Second, it is new, which means nobody has a track record with it on spoken word yet. Treat it as a fast first pass: run it, then listen to the repaired spots in context. Where it worked, you have saved yourself a lot of manual editing. Where it did not, fall back to the two methods below.
Any automatic repair can take a bite out of a consonant it mistook for a click. Solo the vocal and play through each repaired spot. A "t" or "k" that suddenly sounds soft or lisped is a sign the repair went too far.
Method 1: clicks in a gap between words
This is the easy case and it covers most lip smacks, because smacks usually happen when you open your mouth to start speaking. The click sits in silence, so nothing useful is next to it.
Two ways to handle it, and the first is better:
Duck it with a take volume envelope
Right-click the item and look under Take for the take volume envelope. Add points either side of the click and pull the level down between them. A reduction is safer than a deletion because the room tone underneath the click keeps playing, so the edit does not announce itself.
Start by pulling the click down by a large amount and listen. If the spot now sounds like a hole in the recording, you took too much out. Ten to fifteen decibels of reduction is often enough to make a smack disappear while leaving the room sounding continuous.
Or split it out and fade
Put the edit cursor just before the click, press S to split, split again just after it, and reduce the volume of the middle piece. Do not simply delete it and leave a gap of digital silence, because an abrupt jump from room tone to nothing is itself audible. Keep short fades at each edit so the transitions are smooth. REAPER adds small crossfades at split points by default.
This is the same editing discipline used for breaths and filler words, covered in how to edit out filler words and breaths in REAPER, and for larger one-off events in how to remove a cough or one-off noise in REAPER.
Method 2: clicks on top of a word
When the click lands in the middle of speech you cannot turn the level down, because you would turn the word down with it. This is where REAPER's stock spectral editing earns its keep, and it is the part most guides leave out because they assume you have RX.
The approach is to attenuate only the narrow band of frequencies where the click lives, for only the few milliseconds it lasts, and leave the rest of the word untouched.
Select the click on the spectrogram
With the spectrogram showing, drag a selection around the bright vertical stripe. Turn snapping off first, or you will not be able to select something this short.
Add a spectral edit
Right-click the selection and choose Spectral edits → Add spectral edit to item. A translucent box appears over the item with a set of small knobs attached to it. The box sets which frequencies and which slice of time you are acting on.
Pull the region gain down
The top knob is the spectral region gain. Reduce it until the click goes. Deliberately overdoing it for a moment makes it obvious whether your box is actually over the click or slightly off.
Soften the edges
The two knobs under the gain are the time fade and the frequency fade. They crossfade into and out of the edit horizontally and vertically. Without them a spectral edit can sound like a hole punched in the voice. With them the same edit usually becomes inaudible.
Spectral edits are not destructive, so you can delete one from the right-click menu and start again. You can also stack several small edits rather than trying to catch everything with one large box, which generally sounds better.
REAPER's spectral editing is capable but it is a set of gain boxes, not a full resynthesis engine. Isolated ticks over sustained speech usually come out cleanly. A smack that is louder than the word it is sitting on, or a run of clicks packed together, is where a dedicated repair tool still wins.
Tools that will not fix this
Plenty of REAPER advice gets pointed at mouth clicks and does not work. Knowing why saves you an afternoon.
| Tool | Why people try it | Why it fails here |
|---|---|---|
| ReaFIR in Subtract mode | It is the stock noise remover | It works by learning a profile of steady noise and subtracting it. A click is a one-off transient with no steady version to profile, so there is nothing to learn. Right tool for hiss and hum, wrong tool for ticks. See reducing background noise in a podcast in REAPER. |
| A de-esser | Both problems are "high frequency mouth sounds" | A de-esser reacts to sibilance, which is a sustained hiss on "s" and "sh". A click is an impulse of a different shape and usually slips straight past the detector. See how to de-ess vocals in REAPER. |
| A noise gate | It removes sound between words | Clicks are often louder than the room tone, so they hold the gate open. Set the threshold high enough to catch them and the gate starts chewing the ends of words. |
| A narrow EQ cut across the track | Notch out the click frequency | Clicks are broadband and each one is different, so there is no single frequency to notch. A cut deep enough to matter dulls the whole voice for the entire episode. |
| Compression | It controls peaks | Compression reduces dynamic range, which makes quiet clicks more audible relative to speech, not less. Do your click editing before any compression. |
Steady digital clicking or crackle across a whole recording is a completely different problem with a completely different cause, covered in how to fix crackle and clicks in a recording in REAPER.
What this will not do
- It will not make a heavily clicky take sound like it was recorded by someone with a hydrated mouth. Editing reduces the problem, it does not rewrite the performance.
- It will not run unattended. There is no stock REAPER process that finds and fixes mouth noise across an hour of speech without you listening to the result.
- It will not fix clicks that are buried under a loud word if the click is the louder of the two. At that point you are choosing between a click and a damaged word.
- It will not help with sibilance, plosives or breaths. Those are three separate problems with three separate fixes.
Stop them at the source
Every minute you spend on prevention saves you several in editing. Before the next session:
- Drink water, and keep drinking it. Dry mouth is the single biggest cause. Room-temperature water during the session works better than a large glass beforehand.
- Move back a little, or off axis. Intimate mouth detail falls away quickly with distance. Angling the mic slightly across your mouth rather than straight at it also helps. If moving back makes the voice sound thin or roomy, that is a trade-off worth understanding first: see how close you should be to the mic when recording vocals.
- Leave a beat of silence before you start speaking. The open-mouth smack then lands in a gap, where it is trivial to remove, instead of on top of your first word.
- Avoid dairy immediately before recording. This one is widely repeated by voice professionals rather than formally studied, so treat it as worth trying rather than established fact.
When paying for a repair tool is reasonable
StudioRescue's default position is that stock REAPER does more than people think, and for an occasional podcast or a voiceover here and there the methods above are enough. But be honest about volume. If you are editing several hours of close-miked speech every week, and a meaningful share of your time goes on ticks, a dedicated mouth de-click module pays for itself in hours saved rather than in sound quality. That is a workflow decision about your time, not an admission that REAPER cannot do it.
Mouth clicks are short, mostly high-frequency, one-off ticks, which is why noise reduction, de-essers and gates all miss them. Find them on the spectrogram, try Edit → Repair Pops/Clicks in REAPER 7.80 as a fast first pass, duck the ones in gaps with a take volume envelope, and use a spectral edit with time and frequency fades for the ones sitting on top of words. Then fix your water intake and mic angle so there are fewer of them next time.
Sources
- Cockos, REAPER changelog for version 7.80 (released September 13, 2026) - adds an
Edit → Repair Pops/Clicksdialog "to interactively find pops/clicks and apply sample-edit spectral repair", plus actions to go to the next and previous detected audio pop/click. reaper.fm/download - Cockos, REAPER (current version 7.80) - REAPER ships with its stock effects and editing toolset, and version 7 licences include free updates. reaper.fm
- Matt Houghton, “Spectral Editing In Reaper,” Sound on Sound, December 2017 - the spectrogram view via Peaks Display Settings or the item right-click menu; adding a spectral edit with Spectral edits → Add spectral edit to item; the spectral region gain, time fade and frequency fade controls; and the note that REAPER's spectral editing does not replace dedicated tools such as iZotope RX or SpectraLayers. soundonsound.com/techniques/spectral-editing-reaper
- Gearspace forum thread, “Lip and mouth smacks/clicks removal methods?” - evidence that the problem recurs and that the usual recommendation, iZotope RX Advanced, is priced out of reach for people who want it only for mouth noise. gearspace.com