I'm working on an album with a guitarist, and a crazy amount of clips he sends me have a problem where the beginning of the clips click. I've had the problem myself before, but the frequency of his is extremely irritating because we have to go through the whole song and dance of him recording, sending me the clips, me importing and reviewing them, and then crossing our fingers that a given clip isn't affected and having to start all over again. So I'm obviously looking for a way to fix this when it does crop up (as well as what might prevent the problem to begin with).
 
All I can really find on the issue is an old (2003) article from Anderton () He mentions that the likely culprit is DC offset, and given the description of my problem, it seems like it's exactly that. You can sometimes even zoom in really close and see a sudden spike where the clip was split. Seeing how 10 years have passed since the article was written, Sonar does now provide a 'Remove DC Offset' feature. I tried selecting both the entire track and selecting only the affected sections, but no amount of parameter settings is removing the click. I'm still not sure I'm using it correctly, though.
 
Of course, it may also not be the problem, which is why I'm submitting it to you.

That happens when the clip wasn't split at a point where the signal was at zero, the so-called "zero-crossing". No problem, though - just slip-edit the beginning of the clip so the onset of signal is gradual rather than sudden.

Either what bitflipper said or you forgot to demagnetize the razor blade before you spliced the tape...
Oops, showing my age!

bitflipper
That happens when the clip wasn't split at a point where the signal was at zero, the so-called "zero-crossing". No problem, though - just slip-edit the beginning of the clip so the onset of signal is gradual rather than sudden.

Unfortunately, there is no data at the beginnings or ends of these clips, so this tactic does not help. He does a lot of punch-in tracking.

If there were no data there would be no click. Zoom in big and you'll see it.

bitflipper
If there were no data there would be no click. Zoom in big and you'll see it.

I maxed the view and there was indeed a very very very slight overrun in the sample I checked, so I trimmed that back, but the click persists. I ended up slipping both ends of the transition back so far that there was an audible gap and there is still a click. That does sound less like a DC offset issue to me now though. Is there perhaps a buffer setting I should try?

barbersurgeon

bitflipper
That happens when the clip wasn't split at a point where the signal was at zero, the so-called "zero-crossing". No problem, though - just slip-edit the beginning of the clip so the onset of signal is gradual rather than sudden.

Unfortunately, there is no data at the beginnings or ends of these clips, so this tactic does not help. He does a lot of punch-in tracking.

That's probably the cause of the problem. The solution might be more complicated.
 
You could try applying a very short clip fade at the beginning of the clip, but if you have a lot of these to do, well it's not an enviable task.
 
Or, you could bounce the whole lot to clip and listen again. Sometimes this will help
 
Or, you could use a volume envelope and duck it out, again using a short fade, whenever there's nothing audible

Bristol_Jonesey
That's probably the cause of the problem. The solution might be more complicated.
You could try applying a very short clip fade at the beginning of the clip, but if you have a lot of these to do, well it's not an enviable task.
Or, you could bounce the whole lot to clip and listen again. Sometimes this will help
Or, you could use a volume envelope and duck it out, again using a short fade, whenever there's nothing audible

Thanks for the tips. I've tried some of these tactics and it is indeed a chore. Oh well. It was worth asking about! Sometimes when we're really lucky, the percussion and other instruments completely masks the sound, so there's that too. =D

This click or pop can also come from not lining up the clips properly. I've found that it's very hard to line them up properly to not get a click if I have the snap to grid turned off.  That makes lining them up correctly a real exercise in frustration. Using the snap to grid set to 1/16 usually gets me nice clean edit points where I can slide the new clip over and everything is lovely and quiet at the junction.  Level differences are easy to fix with envelopes or processing a gain increase or decrease.
 
I have also solved a click in the middle of a clip by zooming way in to the point where I can see the wave in detail and see that click. I then simply drag across the spike, and highlight it and use either gain reduction or mute and apply it to that very small section of the wave. Zoom out a bit and play the clip through that part. Most of the time, the mute or gain reduction becomes totally invisible in the mix and the click is gone. Only rarely do I have to UNDO that mute and try a different strategy. This method does work, but tends to work better where there are other things going on in the mix to mask that tiniest moment of silence in the offending track. On a solo track, this may not work well because we are able to hear those thousandths of a second moment of silence in that music.
 
hope this helps

Why Sonar needs a proper wave editor. 
And why I hate cutting tracks into small chunks.