Audacity Forum

I think I would probably export a full quality 44100, 16-bit, Stereo as a backup before I did that. Once you sub-sample, there is increased digital quality damage and it's permanent.

Koz

It looks like you are changing that in the drop-down to the left of the track, when you're actually supposed to change it in the Project Rate at the lower left of the Audacity window. You can change the sample depth at the Export step. Instead of exporting to WAV, export to Other Uncompressed Files....

If we haven't scared him off, I'd be interested if he monitors the computer playthrough, even with the echo just to be sure the computer is getting the show OK. If it's a USB error, playthrough would be trash.

Koz

I don't know that I've ever heard a USB recording error produce two shows in the same playback. This isn't a normal damaged USB error. People are not lining up complaining about this effect. Ticking, yes, holes and gaps, certainly, noise, yes, dropping out completely, sure. Speed and sync problems, ...

@Gale
Can you find that posting where I complained about the same error?
If I have a date, I can locate the sound clip, a WAV, that will provide second, good quality evidence of the error.
Koz

Using equipment every four years is extraordinarily dangerous. You take the batteries out, right? If you don't, one of these times you're going to try to use it and the battery compartment is going to be flooded with caustic, orange crud from the leaking batteries ... and that's the end of the recor...

@nrbrook Do you have an SSD Solid State Drive? Something somebody said a while ago rang a bell. Some SSDs take steps to prevent the drive from repeatedly beating up one small portion of the memory. They do this by "wandering," changing the addressing scheme very slightly over time to add &...

The data thinks everything is just fine. The show is trash.

It's not a bug. A bug is a very specific thing. This appears to be a Mac oddity. Once every three or four years. Restart the Mac and it should be ok. I had not restarted in a very long time. The Mac that did this is not on WiFi.

Koz

If the Mac doesn't recognize it as a sound device, then it won't show up in System Preferences and it will be invisible to Audacity.

Koz

Audacity may not show you overload and distortion until you export a sound file. If you didn't listen to it after the export, you may not know it doesn't sound very good.

Koz