Audacity Forum

<<<I downloaded and put the effects in the audacity plugins folder but they are greyed out in audacity.>>>

Just to cover the bases, you did select some audio on the timeline first, right?

Koz

<<<the second track records at a slightly faster tempo>>> That's the sort of thing that happens when the sound equipment uses different electronics to play back than they did to record. If you record at 44100 Hz, that means, eliminating the abbreviations, fourty-four thousand, one hundred cycles per...

<<<I recorded it as mono (I don't know why>>> Audacity wakes up from first birthday in Mono, not Stereo. Change in the Audacity Preferences. <<<now I have 6 separate tracks. (I did that because it's easier for me to find and correct goofs in smaller segments.)>>> It's easier for me to work like that...

I know you're upset, but try not to leave any words out. <<<I installed on Windows XP.>>> You installed what on Windows XP? There are multiple Audacity versions. <<<it not only doesn't recognize the track time>>> It may have troubles recognizing the track format. Audacity defaults to 32-bit floating...

Audacity can become unstable on Windows machines if their hard drives are over 90% full and/or have not been defragmented.
Koz

Might this also account for the apparently much higher instability Macs seem to have with 24-bit audio?

Koz

<<<Is that the same as a noise gate? i.e. downward expansion below a threshold?>>> Yes, that's it. "Don't worry about the room noise, we can fix it in post." Maybe you can fix it in post production. I'm going home. Call me if you get anything working. [confident of full night's sleep] Koz

I bet I know. You have extreme DC offset somewhere in the analog audio chain before digitization. It's negative which means the negative going parts of the waveform will get damaged (clipped) way before the positive portions do. Note that the damage isn't constant over the example. I bet there is an...

<<<I stop the software and have it replay a small portion of music over again and, a majority of the time, most of the noises disappear.>>> I know. How are you listening to the work? I bet you're not using headphones into the sound card, right? You're using some sort of external amplifier and speake...

Or you can keep digging. Some audio cards/systems have a "20dB Gain Boost" that can go a long way to solving problems like this. We routinely record training sessions and we're old friends with that 20dB boost. The corporate hardware people got everybody's attention a while ago by buying s...