Best way to heal a spike, audition cs6

Question

I've got a spike (electromagnetic noise spike from the wireless microphone on the talent, sounds like it's a cell phone hit maybe) in an audition file I can't seem to get fix. All I want to do is minimize it. This is a class room presentation, so perfection isn't the aim. Just a general clean up to make a nicer presentation. Here's what I've got:
You can see fairly clearly the two wide band "hits". I've been trying to "heal" them with the healing brush, to no avail. If I make the brush big enough to cover the width of the spike, it leaves a (very) audible "hole" in the sound which is just about as bad as the "szzzttt" of the spike, and it blurs the dialog that's under it all. If I make the brush smaller and just try to reduce the magnitude of the noise, I get very little effect.
As you can probably guess, I'm a newbie at fixing this kind of thing with Audition cs6. I've searched the F1 help and the audition_ch6_help.pdf file, and found next to nothing. So... how is this normally handled? Any pointers to a tutorial that illustrates dealing with something like this? I'm just thinking that this has got to be a fairly common task.

Answer 1

Trouble is, it's not a spike at all - they're generally easy to deal with because they're much shorter. You may have to deal with this noise in at least two sections, though. For a start, you can generally reduce of all the HF part of it (the bit beside the two dark blue upper parts of the spectrum) by using Noise Reduction. Take a noise profile from the dark blue part of the spectrum, move over an expand the selection slightly to cover the upper parts of the glitch, and try applying it. You may have to muck about with the controls somewhat, but I think you should be able to get a worthwhile reduction in that part, at least - this won't affect any speech at all.
As for the rest of it - well you may have to reduce the individual noise lines that aren't part of the signal by zooming the spectral view vertically, and picking them out as individual horizontal sections.
But there are two things I'd have to add - the first is that without actually trying it, I can't be sure of how successful this would be. If you post about 5 seconds of it somewhere though, I could give you a much better idea of what to do! The second is that Audition isn't actually the best tool for dealing with heavy-duty noise and glitch reduction; iZotope's RX2 is. But that is seriously expensive, and only worth it if you have to do a lot of this sort of thing.