Audacity No Longer Plays Back Very Short Selections Of Audio

[torikamal]

Audacity no longer plays back very short time selections of audio. To be more accurate, it does look like it’s playing, but no audio is output.

For example, in this image below, it will play back audio with output:

But if it is shortened to just the audio I am trying to edit (a vocal noise I want to remove from the track):

No audio is output. This makes it more difficult to edit small bits of audio because it’s harder to tell what waveform is matching up to the audio playback.

I know this issue has been present for at least several versions and I was hoping it would just get fixed with some updates, but so far no luck.

Is there a way to ensure that even very short time selections get played back?

[Wrecks0]

I have that problem when I use Bluetooth or USB connected headphones. I solved it by plugging them into the headphone jack of the sound card.

Even then I sometimes have to hit Play a couple of times to hear the selection.

[torikamal]

Thank you for the suggestion @Wrecks0 !

I’m running everything wired on a desktop that doesn’t have a Bluetooth adapter and my Wifi adapter is disabled (running via Ethernet), so this issue for me is likely triggered by a difference source.

Perhaps it’s my audio settings that might need to be tweaked? I haven’t changed anything in a long time, but perhaps there have been some changes to Audacity itself that no longer play nice with very short clips and my settings. Does anybody have any recommendations?

[Trebor]

Try an audio host other than MME, (there are only 2 other options)
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_selecting_your_recording_device.html

[torikamal]

Thank you for the idea, @Trebor ! I got the closest with Directsound. If I made the clip a little bit longer, I could sometimes get just a slight bit of sound through Directsound, and sometimes there wouldn’t be any output.

I did try bringing the buffer down to about 50, but that didn’t seem to make a difference.

[Wrecks0]

It says right there that the playback is on a Foscusrite USB device.

[torikamal]

I think I must have misunderstood your original post to just mean USB headphones.

My audio interface is connected via USB-C 3. However, this, previous to some updates, was playing back without issue.

I think I’ll try rolling back to an older version of Audacity to determine which version still plays back the short audio.

[torikamal]

I did roll back to previous versions of Audacity 3 and even went back to Audacity 2.4.2. However, I found that I am still experiencing the no audio output for very short selections of audio.
That leads me to believe that the issue has to do with my computer as I do not believe I was previously experiencing the short audio playback issue with Audacity 2.4.2.

My computer hardware, including my Focusrite Saffire 2i2 audio interface (that’s what is showing up as Speakers for the Playback device in the screenshot above) is still the same as when Audacity 2.4.2 was released, so my belief is that it’s either:

• Some setting I changed on my computer.
• A driver issue.
• A windows update issue.

If I figure out what fixes it, I’ll reply back here.

[Trebor]

Microfades ? … Playback Preferences - Audacity Manual