Audacity Forum

A good recording level to aim for is about half the track height (around -6 dB). Commercially recorded music is often made to be as loud as possible. This is probably the case with your backing track, but as a "backing" track you won't want it to be so loud as it will drown out the new voc...

OK, so you edited your post - what's changed?

You're overloading something somewhere.

What equipment are you using and how is it all connected together?

It's electrical interference of some sort. If you're recording on a laptop, try running it on batteries while you record.

PS: I'm really liking how Audacity works in KXStudio compared to Ubuntu Studio. As I'm not a programmer, I don't know what is different in the "background" (ie dependencies, upgrades, etc) but I haven't had any glitches or hitches with Audacity at all. I'd recommend KXStudio to anyone wan...

Set the number of recording channels to "1 (mono)" http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Device_Toolbar

I don't know how you managed to lose the other track, but perhaps this will help: http://manual.audacityteam.org/manual/h ... jects.html

Steve, are you saying that the spectrum "curve" as it appears, is actually upside down No. :? I'm saying that a full scale sine wave like this (below) has an amplitude of 0 dB (relative to "full scale") and will show up on the spectrum plot as (about) 0 dB. firsttrack000.png A s...

These are the repositories I currently have in use: Ooh there's a lot there :) One of them messes with the lame libs, It's just difficult to find the origin of a package version in apt(itude) or apt-get in my experience. It's easy with Synaptic. Synaptic is available in the main Ubuntu repository. ...

Monitoring through speakers while recording with a microphone is a bad approach because the microphone will tend to pick up the sound coming out through the speakers as well as the sound that you are trying to record. At best it will tend to make the recording sound echoey, and at worst the speakers...

What's in your /etc/apt/sources.list ?
(you can open the file in gedit (read only) by typing this in a terminal: