Audacity Forum

I've never been a fan of Windows Media Player - there's too many formats that it can't play (Ogg, Flac, 32bit WAV...) and it's seems more concerned about connecting to the Internet, reporting back to Microsoft, looking up track listings, recommending songs to buy, encoding my files into a Windows fo...

Experiment with different microphone positions. For the best sound quality you need to find the "sweet spot".

It sounds like the problem described here: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=8592

That's what we call "distortion" or "clipping". It happens when the recording level is set too high.

What are you recording from, a microphone? (probably not, but you will be able to tell us exactly how you are recording).

I just started using Audacity yesterday and I have to say so far it's been very buggy. You mean that you have had difficulty with it. That is not necessarily the same as "bugs". If this is all down to bugs then we can not help you, you'll just have to wait for the developers to fix the bu...

it was 48,000 and not 44,100, but it would not play in my media player What media player is that? but I really just wanted to change the PCM frequency, a message said I needed this codec. Where did that message come from? As far as I know ACM codec is obsolete, so I don't know why anything these da...

I don't think that you need the ACM codec. Why do you think that you do?

Audacity can not tell you the key of a song. In fact, I don't know of any program that can. To know the key of a song you need to know about the harmonic structure of a song. You can not work out the key of a song from signal notes, or even single chords. You need to know how the chords fit together...

It depends on context. You could have quite severe clipping on some types of sound without it being very noticeable, whereas relatively little clipping on other types of sound could be very noticeable. It also depends on what you are listening with (quality of amplifier, speakers ...) and on how att...

Tell us a bit about your system - what sound card do you have? What / How are you recording? Speakers? Headphones? How are they connected?

Audacity Edit menu > Preferences > Audio I/O
What do you have set for the Record and Playback devices?