Converting LP to digital. Advice please...

lewm - Removing clicks and pops indeed changes the data. But, I would argue, the clicks and pops have already done that. Getting the signal back to as close to the original as possible has to be better than leaving the click or pop in. All you have to do is look at the waveform to see the distortion that the pop or click creates. If you only have a few pops or clicks you can just go to those specific spots in the file and do the correction on that specific spot. You do not have to process the whole track. Vinyl Studio, for example, lets you fix just a specific area.  The program will fix the selected section or you can do it yourself manually, while looking at the waveform. You can listen to that section with and without the fix. Give it a try.  Attempting to fix a badly damaged section, especially when the flaw lies along the track rather than across it, can do more damage than good. But I find that removal of a typical short pop or click always sounds better than leaving the defect in.

Vinyl Studio is a great program for this process. It can record the data from USB or import a file. You can split the files and do various cleanup operations. One of its main advantages is that it does lookup of album data for several databases including discogs and imports track timings and names. This greatly speeds up the task of splitting tracks and providing names and other metadata. 30 day trial and only $29 for the license. Don't let the low price deter you - it is a great program.

There has been discussion about the fact that declicking a digitized file can damage the underlying music and therefore some people decide to not try to declick their files. Personally, I think the data is already damaged by the click and trying to fix it is worthwhile. For me, removing the click is almost always less noticeable than the click and usually I cannot hear any flaw in the correction.

With a tool like Vinyl Studio you can have it automatically declick (or de-hiss) an entire file or just a section of the file. That is, you can locate a click you want to fix and just fix that small portion of the file, leaving the rest untouched. You can also do the declick fix manually by moving the boundaries of the fix and watching the waveform change. You can also listen to the section with and without the fix.

When you look at a click in a waveform the distortion is very noticeable and you can look at the fix and decide for yourself if you think it has damaged the music. This linked file is an example of a classic click - about .004 seconds in length. In the view, the green line is the music waveform and the black line in the click. Within the green box you can see the click and the fix. You, of course have no idea what the original waveform was, but it is pretty clear that the fix is more natural that the click. In this case both channels were declicked. The left channel (top) had more damage than the right channel and fixes are applied separately.

Take a look at the image. I think you will see that the declick reproduces the surrounding waveform pretty well and when listening to the fix you cannot hear any distortion.

If you like your clicks for nostalgia purposes leave them in. But I must say listening to my digitized vinyl with almost all the pops and clicks removed and with hiss removed really does make them sound very good. Once again, you can de-hiss the whole track or just a portion. On quiet passages de-hissing really can make a difference.

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP7GQZpf9MyjE92rosOG1WmK8kU7dBZ2leyYkQA/photo/AF1QipPEe3AU79FBDTemD7eOlcJe-vLiNcd6CCke8p9Z

Here is the waveform of a very damaged track. You can see the regular scratches in black. Even this cleaned up well, with only a very few glitches noticeable in the final version.If you count the main clicks you will find about 33 per minute.

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP7GQZpf9MyjE92rosOG1WmK8kU7dBZ2leyYkQA/photo/AF1QipN3bOPPIPZhrPb3jTJ8trJ0IKxxzDrAQZQGdDJ4