I recently recorded a voice conversation where I used Audacity on my PC to record my voice and the other person used Audacity on his PC to record his voice. I am fairly confident we were both using 3.7.3. My PC is a AMD 7600 with 64GB ram. I don’t know what type of PC he uses.
The problem is that his recording came out at a slightly slower speed than mine, so when I imported the wav file he sent me to my Audacity project, it gradually falls out of sync. The difference was about 2-3 tenths of a percent, so by the end of the 2 hour recording there was a several second difference between them. I was able to correct this with a tempo change, but I’m curious why this would happen in the first place?
The sound file technical specifications depend on the maker of the soundcard, or in the case of USB microphones, the maker of the internal electronics. If they’re home computers, nobody is expecting any great accuracy.
At the beginning of the performance, somebody stands in the middle and yells “Marker” and claps loudly. If you think about it at the end do it again and yell “End Mark” and clap loudly.
This is where you remember to tell us you’re in different cities.
Thanks ok I figured that 44.1khz would always be 44.1khz but sounds like there’s always some margin of error. I did actually do the clap thing at the beginning but didn’t think about doing in at the end since, well, I didn’t know that would be a thing.
We are both within the greater Seattle area so not that far apart, but since we were both recording locally, why would distance matter?
When you went shopping for a computer, you always had one eye on price, right? All you need to do is get close enough to 44.1 so most people can’t tell. Lots of messy things happen when you go from one microphone/recording system to two.
The movie people shooting separate sound use serious equipment to make sure this time drift thing doesn’t happen. Also, that’s the clap-board with the scene number written on it.
“Scene 26. Camera Mark!” (Bang). The movie camera shoots the board motion and the sound lady records the sound. Less well known is the upside down clapboard at the end of the scene.
If you’re not in the same room, you can’t easily get one clap to appear on both microphones.
But to bring this home. I think what you got is normal.