
At first used Audacity Amplify to drop the levels to somewhere below -5 to -6 along with Audacity click removal - reloaded the clean clips and from there was able to get clean output with Openshot.

Using Audacity there are various easy methods of normalizing/limiting/equalizing/cleaning spikes up. Loading the original clips into Audacity though could see tiny spikes in the clips that were inaudible in the previous listening environments I'd played them back in. I'm using Linux/Ubuntu, removal of Pulseaudio and other tweaks did not make a difference.

Initially I had problems with audio crackles & pops - rendering with Openshot 2.5.1.
