I have several hours of solo voice tracks to clean up. The recordings are low-noise, but there are occasional lip smacks and mouth sounds that I need to remove, or at least duck. It's very tedious by hand editing (in Vegas or Sound Forge), so I'd like to be able to "filter" them out as much as possible.

The lip smacks are like pops or clicks, peaking about 15 dB lower than the voice. But these pops are too long to be recognized by Sony's click and crackle removal plugin (as in LP clicks and pops), or it produces artifacts in the voice when set high enough to catch the pops.

An ordinary noise gate doesn't work either, because setting the threshold high enough to avoid opening on the lip smacks results in the beginning of some words being clipped off after a pause long enough for the gate to be closed.

I've been trying the freeware Pacific Soundcraft Noise Gate which has a 100 ms look ahead, and adjustable gain reduction. I'd be happy just to reduce the lip and mouth sounds 6-12 dB. This was a promising plugin, until I discovered some words were still getting clipped, because the soft-spoken speaker had very soft beginnings on some words, particularly beginning with "m". This sound is more than 25 dB below voice peak and longer than the 100 ms look ahead on the gate. So I have to reduce the threshold, which also cause the gate to open on the lip noises. If the gate had 250-300 ms look ahead, I might be able to get away with a higher threshold, without cutting of soft leading edges of words.

Does anyone know of a VST or DirectX noise gate with a longer look ahead?

If the gate was tracking an RMS level, like VU, rather than peak, it might be better at distinguishing pops from words. Anyone know of an RMS-based noise gate?

Or is there a better way to do this?