Audacity Forum

Are you building up to wanting to do overdubbing, instrument over instrument? It will be required that you have headphones or earbuds. If you're on an electric guitar or electric keyboard (direct connection), you could get away with listening quietly to the original tracks with speakers to guide you...

Many people doing live recording for the first time want to hear themselves as they do it -- they leave speakers running while they perform. You can't do that. http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/wynonna2.jpg She's not doing that by accident. Having a speaker and microphone running in the same room is a ...

What's concerning us is you have literally all the common symptoms of plugging your mixer in wrong. Your deskside computer had a full sound card which allowed you to plug either a mixer or a microphone using different sockets (pink for microphone, blue for mixer). Your new laptop does not have that....

Lenovo t61 laptop You are grandly overloading something. This is more like what your recording is supposed to look like... http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_record.jpg The bouncing red bars are not supposed to go all the way up and the blue waves are not supposed to fill the space. Do you ha...

The amount of "amplification" of the noise profile is set by the new "Sensitivity" slider. I don't know that I would have done it that way. The settings for this are fairly constrained. The sample needs to be bigger than it is now and at no time should it clip. In my book that s...

I have no problem recording my voice into the app.

Pull down either of the first two short sound clips from here....

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

...and see if they open and play.

Koz

Any way you can lower the recording in the first place? If you're that close to overload that MP3 conversion causes problems, you're probably making the original recordings too loud. I know everyone thinks they need to be as loud as possible to compete with commercial recordings, but we're talking a...

You're doing this on headphones, right? It's a common mistake to use the built-in microphone and built-in speakers -- or even desktop speakers at the same time. They will interfere with each other. You can also get really wacky results if you're on a newer Windows machine and don't turn off the conf...

A word on Audacity versions. Audacity 1.2 is very old and not supported, updated or patched. Audacity 1.3.12 is highly recommended. http://audacityteam.org/download/ You need to get the additional software, lame (for MP3) and FFMpeg (for newer sound formats) from the same place you got Audacity. Aud...

Guitars have some interesting problems. The output of a guitar pickup is more powerful than you think it's going to be. You may not connect it to the Mic-In of anything. You will almost certainly get distortion and overloading. So Line-In it is, and the signal will be slightly low compared to all th...