Audacity Forum

It's worth a shot. You could have inadvertently forced Audacity to use very old and out of date or damaged preferences.

Try resetting them (scroll down).

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/preferences.html

Koz

This is a popular posting. No solutions past money-based Skype recording and open-air conference call recording. The instant you try to do "grownup" radio call-in style production you get into telephone hybrids and writing big checks. This isn't easy. Land-line telephones in particular hav...

Yes, try managing music that you didn't make. Koz

Do a screen grab and post what it looks like when the import fails. Does it look more or less like this except the blue line is flat instead of wavy? http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg Do you have the same !.0, 0.0, -1.0 for each track that I have in the illustration? It does not ...

How full is your hard drive? If it's almost jammed full, Audacity will not find room to put the cache or run. Go > Computer. Control-click on the hard drive > Get INFO. Rescuing a full drive is more of an adventure than you think. the Mac will not let you delete any files because it can't manage the...

Another PC. I didn't hear anything even remotely like what you were describing. Koz

just putting my phone on speaker and using the laptops hardware microphone to record both sides but the clarity isn't as clear.

Try a higher quality external microphone. This is by far the easiest and cheapest way out of this. Koz

That's when it gets complicated. Some effects need amplification to work well and some effects change the volume of the work leading to distortion and damage. I would not Amplify (or Normalize) to 0. Odd things can happen that close to overload. There have been postings of people who amplified a sho...

We implemented Effects Categorization in an early Audacity and it was an immediate un-hit. It greatly increased the time needed for multiple applications of an effect, required in, for example Noise Reduction, and at the time, there was no way to assign most used effects to hot keys.

Koz

One point. Never try to capture live music that way. Live music needs a good 10dB to 15dB or more headroom or expansion room before overload. Live music is uncontrolled and it's very easy to hit peak overloading or clipping by accident. There's no way to recover from that and it's fatal.

Koz