(Possibly) Idiotic Microphone Question

[Duo Himura]

Hey all. I'm sort of a... half-newb when it comes to video editing--I know a lot the principles from working with Movie Maker as far as the artistry of it goes, but I'm clueless about the technical aspects. Naturally, having finally gotten my hands on Adobe Premiere (6.0) my first order of business was to try and launch into a massive hour+ long fan parody project in the vein of This is Otakudom or Nescaflowne. I know. Bear with me.

Anyway, my problem is one that's been plaguing me for a little while now, and that is that whenever I use my microphone to record, I seem to get a faint... clicking noise at the start and end of my recordings. I considered that it was the noise of... well, clicking, to turn off Audacity, but that theory went nowhere when cutting back the recording simply moved the noise to wherever it stopped. Currently I'm thinking (thanks to Audacity's handy visual representation of audio) that the noise is the result of the inherent difference between whatever background noise I may have picked up in the recording and absolute silence, but I'm not sure. Making the voice clip fade out, even from "silence" to actual silence does seem to improve things, producing a -very- faint clicking sound instead of a just faint clicking sound.

I would, however, like to eliminate the problem altogether, as any sort of noise framing all of my voice clips would eventually become noticeable, even if it wasn't immediately apparent. Obviously I could try to do multiple lines in one take but that complicates things, especially since, ideally, I would like to be able to record multiple takes of a single conversation and mix the best readings of each line or what have you. So does anyone know exactly what this is and how to fix it? My microphone is pretty much a basic, desktop mic, but I don't -think- it's related to the problem.

Anyway, I have the feeling that this is all something obvious and/or stupid, as it doesn't seem to affect any other halfway-decent fan projects that use recorded dialogue, but I'm at a loss, so any advice would be helpful. If a sample would help I can try to provide one, but for the moment I'm sort of hoping that someone will recognize the problem from my description, since I'm not entirely sure how to host an audio clip here. I could show you an instance where it came up on a certain website which shall not be named, but... being as that website shall not be named, I'm not sure that's the best solution.

Again, any assistance you may be able to offer would be very much appreciated.

--A probably-crazy-and-in-over-his-head neophyte Adobe-user

[Scintilla]

Take a close look at the samples at the beginning and end of your recording. If there's noticeable distance between them and the center (zero) line in the waveform, then somehow you have a DC offset. Audacity should have an option to remove DC offset in the Normalize effect.

(Even if you did record absolute silence without any background noise, that only means that the amplitude of the waveform isn't changing -- it doesn't necessarily mean that the amplitude is zero. If the amplitude is nonzero even at absolute silence, then you have a DC offset.)

The other thing I was thinking was that perhaps you have another program open that's using the sound card (example: Windows Media Player on pause), and you recorded at a different samplerate than that of whatever that other program was playing back.

[Duo Himura]

Ah, it was the first one--the normalize effect fixed it instantly. Thanks a bunch, I doubt I ever would have figured that out on my own.

Should I bother looking for a cause for this and seeing if there's anything to be done about it, or should I just stick with normalizing everything I record, do you think?

[Scintilla]

Ideally you would want to find the cause, but from the setup you've described, I have no idea what it could be.