You've probably guessed by now that there is no single best way, and that every one of us who does this has our own personal favourites, that are tried and tested for us.
I tend towards a combination of methods, and have recently been doing the same as
DewDude - only NR'ing the silent bits. I also focus only on the major defects, with the reasoning being that a transfer of a noisy LP would have so many minor defects that it would be too difficult (or even impossible) to fix them without ruining the sound.
Couple of things I do:
- I
never Pop/Click the entire file. I've found that certain instrumental passages (particularly in the late 70s/early 80s post-punk 45s and LPs I mainly work on) have serious distortion and artefacts introduced.
- I always use a 40 Hz Steepness 5 Highpass on the entire file - I find this can be helpful in opening up the sound (again, bearing in mind that my musical choice is not known for it's stellar production values), and it reduces a lot of visual "fuzz" in the waveform, allowing me to home in on the real defects without being distracted by things I won't even hear anyway.
- Manual repair of individual big pops is the only way. There is no "one size fits all" solution. Sometimes I copy from one channel to another, sometimes GW's Interpolate works fine, sometimes I crossfade and mix before/after the pop, sometimes Pop/Click works fine, sometimes I just delete the section containing the pop, sometimes I can copy from elsewhere in the song. It's different for each one, and you need to practice, listen and compare.
- Scanning for volume maximums can help you find pops, but some of the most annoying ones can peak nowhere near the maximum, you need to listen.
- Learn to trust your ears; if it sounds alright that's probably because it is, no matter how the wave appears on-screen.
- Get a decent pair of headphones and listen on those, crappy PC speakers just do not cut it where this job is concerned.
- When doing NR I tend to remove frequencies above about 1 KHz from the noise pattern. NR can do serious damage to high frequencies if applied clumsily.
- Small and subtle filtering in incremental steps is far far better than a single big heavy filter; the tonal quality of the original will have a better chance of surviving the process.
- A clean record (get a good cleaning machine if you can), a good TT, good cartridge and clean stylus, and a decent phono stage will give you much better results than any amount of digital filtering applied to a transfer from an el-cheapo source.
Something I don't do yet but will be trying: Boosting the treble will accentuate the noise. So run an inverse RIAA, then clean that (as above), then bring the treble back down.
Finally, I'd recommend getting your ears checked out. Seriously. How good your hearing is will have a large bearing on how effectively you can do this job, and it will be beneficial elsewhere in life as well!