Audacity Forum

Are you using an odd sound system? USB devices? Turntables? Sound cards?

Try resetting Audacity Preferences to 44100, 16-bit, Stereo, and restarting. Audacity defaults don't always get along well with audio hardware.

Koz

I think they will both do that. Audacity Preferences > Audio I/O > 'Play tracks while recording new ones.' You may need to mess around inside the Windows Control Panels a bit, too. You're very next posting is going to be, "How can I avoid the delay when the track plays?" That's called late...

The smallest division Audacity recognizes is the computer file. You will not be able to pick out a single song within that file. Did you record a whole evening of BBC-1?

Koz

No, there's a software package based on the old "Kepex" machines. I can't remember what it's called, but it waits until the average sound level has dropped below a set point and then either takes the sound to zero or reduces it according to a set amount. Hello ssssssss How sssssss Are ssss...

<<<Record as hot as possible without clipping and let it be?>>> Hard to beat that. <<<virtually everything I've read includes normalizing as a standard step in archiving vinyl.>>> Archiving clean vinyl and that effect in Audacity is called Amplify, not Normalize. The Audacity Normalize tool will dam...

As a fuzzy rule, 32 is barely enough for a mono recording and 64 for stereo. There is a cliff at those two points, less than that even by a little bit and many people can hear damage. Above that many people can't. By the time you get to 192, a great many people can not hear any damage at all and man...

<<<I just have to figure out the latency issue.>>> I believe Audacity 1.3 has much better tools for latency problems. Audacity 1.3 isn't "Unstable" any more and we wish they would stop calling it that. There are modern computers that will no longer run Audacity 1.2. Development and patches...

<<<Well...in playing around while waiting for help>>>

You should not be hanging on the computer waiting for someone to respond. Some of the Windows people are multiple time zones away and it could take a half-day or longer to get a response.

Koz

In their auto modes, both Amplify and Normalize only work on the highest point in the song ignoring everything else. The difference between them is Stereo. Normalize increases or decreases each side independently until the highest point from both left and right reaches the setting you picked. Amplif...

<<<how do I adjust the length of the silence once I've put it in?>>> I don't think it's convenient. You make it longer by adding more and shorter by selecting and deleting little chunks. I hope there's a better way. There's a much more exotic way. Put the second half of the performance on a second t...