I am recording drums to MP3 songs, and the drum recording drifts out of sync from the track at a rate around .1 second per minute. I’ve looked it up, but everything I find is either about syncing audio to video, or is a band-aid type of fix involving stretching or shrinking the recording, which I tried; it fills the drum track with blips and glitches and makes it unusable.
The thing is, up until a couple weeks ago, it always stayed synced up just fine. I just recorded one day, (no settings have been changed and nothing has been downloaded) and all of a sudden the mic recording (8 mics through a mixer, recorded as one track in audacity) starts to run slow. I am using windows 10 and version 2.3.3
Please describe (in detail) how you are doing that.
Did you set up “latency correction” before you started the recording?
IF you are using two different devices, such as your built-in soundcard for play back and a USB mixer, or USB interface for recording there WILL be a mismatch between the clocks and sometimes that mismatch is bad enough to cause problems.
…Pros use a super-accurate master clock and interfaces with master-clock inputs so everything stays locked together.
Got it! One of your replies led to something that made me check the audio hosts (you’d think I would have tried them all first; go figure), and I switched it from MME to WASAPI and now it’s staying synced
Thank you for your help!
Synchronization drift is usually caused by audio sample rates that do not match the audio parameters in the sequence. Here is an article that explains this. However, in this week’s cases, the audio synchronization issue was caused by an attempt to edit an MP3 audio file. The MP3 is extremely compressed and often difficult to edit.
, the audio synchronization issue was caused by an attempt to edit an MP3 audio file. The MP3 is extremely compressed and often difficult to edit.
No, it was a driver/hardware problem. MP3 compression adds a few milliseconds of silence to the beginning which will change the “sync” but it does not cause “drift”. Otherwise, MP3 doesn’t mess with the sample rate or do anything to the timing.
it fills the drum track with blips and glitches and makes it unusable.
If you think the problem is from simple sampling errors (matching two slightly different recorders) you might try Effect > Change Speed. That doesn’t seem like it should work, but it gently resamples the work at a different rate depending on your instructions. The control panel lets you mess with the correction in multiple different ways: duration, error accumulation, absolute goal timing, etc. I think you can do it in musical note pitch. Good stuff.
The other tools try to rip the sound apart and put it back together again in the revised way. Those are the ones likely to give actual performance errors, holes, odd noises and sound damage.
Koz
Nevermind that; I changed hosts and it seemed to fix it, but then it came back. Here is exactly what I’m doing:
I have an 8-channel mixer with audio cable outputs to a USB audio interface, which plugs directly into computer.
I play drums along to music on an MP3 player and record just the drums onto audacity through the mixer.
I then load the song separately on audacity and manually line the two tracks up. This has worked just fine for a couple years now; no drift at all, even on 10+ minute long songs. But all of a sudden, I get, at best, 3 seconds of synchronization before there’s a noticeable stagger.
However, I tried the Change Speed thing again though, and this time it didn’t damage any of the audio. I believe having a mouse and headphones plugged in is actually what caused the problem when I tried Change Speed the first time, because when I did a normal recording just now, it had blips, but I unplugged the extra stuff and the next take was clean.
TL;DR still having audio drift, but found a quick fix that’s working just fine.
I believe having a mouse and headphones plugged in is actually what caused the problem when I tried Change Speed the first time
My Opinion that’s not true. Pointing devices and headphones are recommended for high quality editing and production. You may have noticed an odd connection such as ice cream causes drowning deaths.
It is true that some newer computers have security processes that “know” when you have headphones plugged in, but if your edit goes into the dirt because of that minor shift, your machine may not be the best choice for editing and production.
Where is your screen brightness? That can change the power load on the machine.
Koz
You can have a much more serious sync problem if your computer skips tiny portions of the recording. That can be almost invisible on inspection, but the show you recorded and the show you got are different. The recording is shorter, and it doesn’t easily respond to any of the general fixes.
Depending on how bad the error is, sync may not just be off, but sync can wander as the show progresses. It’s unfixable and permanent.
Turn on Audacity > (Edit) Preferences > Recording > [X] Detect Dropouts.
Koz