Audacity on new laptop: unstable recordings

Hello everyone, this is my first post. I’ve been using audacity with a Zoom H4 Pro as a mic for years without issues.

Since I installed Audacity on my new laptop, some odd things have happened:

  • if I play guitar and sing simultaneously, audacity only records the voice
  • if I use a backing track (imported into Audacity as a stereo or mono track) and record my voice in a separate track, the recording turns out very low in volume in certain parts, even totally silent especially in louder parts (but not very loud parts). On the whole, the recording sounds ‘wobbly’ and unstable throughout the song.

Are there settings on this laptop that I ought to change? Is this a new version of Audacity that requires some tweaking?

I’m confident it’s not the microphone, since it works fine if I use it without Audacity.

Thanks a lot for any pointers.

Will have “audio enhancements” enabled by default.
Need to disable them for faithful recording & playback
https://youtu.be/eXGyAzk3fd4?t=49 t=49

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Windows?

This may not be an Audacity Problem. Windows may be using its “enhancement” settings to “clean up” your voice performance. Windows can assume that any sustained musical pitch or tone (such as music) is noise and get rid of it immediately! If the “Noise” is indeed music, then the pitches will be constantly changing and Windows will go nuts trying to find and suppress it all.

Dig down to Windows Enhancements and turn everything off.

Koz

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Thanks a lot @Trebor and @kozikowski , I unchecked the audio enhancement box and everything is back to normal, great!

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