I installed Audacity win-3.7.7-64 bit on my new laptop and I did my best to put the same settings there as in the old audacity version I had in my older computer (=I selected the proper mice and volume). I don’t know if I did everything that is necessary as the new audacity looks completely different from the version I have been using for years. I did the test recording and the result is awful. The sound is realy bad, I had to revert to my old computer and old Audacity (the one that required “Lame” file to incorporate in the program) to be able to do a professional recording. What can I do to make the audacity work on my laptop?
Make sure Windows “Enhancements” are turned OFF.
…They can foul-up the recording in all kinds of strange ways when trying to “help” and it’s one of the most common problems we see here.
Thanks. I will give it a try. But I I think it might be also something else. The audio sounded like recorded inside a can or on a bad quality mic even though I selected my external Rode Microphone.
The audio enhancement(s) are usually on by default.
There can be more than one layer of “audio enhancements“ that need to be turned off for faithful recording and playback … Audacity as reverb detector - #5 by Trebor
Thanks for the feedback. I am trying my best to find the way to turn off those enhancements. I turned something that looke like enhancements directly in Windows settings, but that made it only worse - on the top of the voice sounding still like from a can, now it also has much more background noise. Maybe I need to do something in audacity settings directly, but I don’t know exactely where and what to change. I am attaching the screen of my audacity audio settings - it is in Polish, but hopefully you will be able to figure it out as the order is probably the same in the English version.
It it possible that my mic in incompatible with newest audacity or newer computer? It is usb mic (Rode NT-USB) and it was a great mic 6 years ago but maybe it just doesn’t work that well with newer technology? It still records very good quality audios on the old computer with the old Audacity and I am able to listen to those recordings on the new computer and new audacity and they sound really good. But when I try to record on the new computer and the new audacity it becomes a disaster.
No, if it is connected via USB. I use a very old device (iMic from Griffin, discontinued for a long time now) and it still works with several Mac and Linux devices.
All these problems you (and others) have come from these notorious “Windows enhancements”. Do not try to fool around with Audacity’s settings before these “Windows enhancements” are disabled.
It’s possible to use the old version of Audacity on your new computer …
Having new and old versions of Audacity on the same computer can be a disaster: if you do not take steps* to prevent it, they will share their config(uration) file and corrupt each other.
[ * create “Portable Settings” folder(s) to keep their settings separate ].
Thanks for the info about the mic. Well, I disabled what I knew how in Windows, and as I said it made it worse. So unless there is something I am still not seeing in Windows, it is now about either changing something in new audacity settings or getting rid of the new audacity and going back to the old version
Thnank for all the advices. At the very begining I tried to install the old version of Audacity from my old computer on the new computer, but it required som additional “lame” file or something like that in order to save the files I recorded. Unfortunately I didn’t remember where to find and how to install that “lame file”. I think I will try again to uninstall new audacity and try with the older version.
LAME is only required for export to mp3. You still can export other formats (like WAV or AIFF) and then convert to mp3 using an online converter or a separate program such as iTunes for Windows.
If your settings for Audacity are “broken”, you’d need to delete the “audacity”-folder somewhere in your %appdata%-folder.