Hello, for the last number of years now, whenever I playback a recording, the audio drops briefly every 6 seconds. I know this is a bug as other users have reported it. I am wondering when a bug this obvious will actually be fixed.
Please advise.
Something is interrupting.
Actually… Your multitasking operating system is ALWAYS multitasking & interrupting, even if you’re only running one application. So there are buffers that keep the audio flowing in-and-out, but if something hogs the system for a few milliseconds too long you get buffer overflow (recording) or buffer underflow (playback) and a glitch.
So, try to minimize the number of running applications and background operations. Some people have good results by temporarily turning-off their Wi-Fi or anti-virus.
You can also try going into Edit → Preferences → Audio Settings and increase the buffer length (maybe double it). Or surprisingly, sometimes a buffer length of zero works (I’m pretty sure Windows has it’s own buffers.)
Or, there is a free online book about optimizing Windows for audio called Glitch Free.
I’ve used Audacity for over 15 years. This glitch has started occurring 2-3 years ago only. Since, I have upgraded my PC and I always shutdown unnecessary apps whenever I am using Audacity (recording or playing back). The fact that the dropouts occur exactly every 6 seconds tells me the software is at stake.
On the forum? Can you point to one (or more) of the other user posts? Getting multiple eyes-on for a problem can be useful.
It tells me Audacity is sensitive to something in your operating environment. It’s something not very popular that others (but not many others) have on their machines. Like you have accidentally identified all the users of one particular roll-playing game.
Can you make it worse? How do you know it occurs at exactly 6 second intervals? That could be important because we might identify a Windows process that takes 5.8 seconds.
Where did the recording come from?
So there is a very brief silence. It doesn’t "tick or “pop”?
Ko
Try to answer as many of those questions as you can. Don’t answer the last question and call it a day.
Koz
Continuous pauses when playing the mix - #6 by Trebor
After the track plays through once the hiccoughs are cured.
I think I figured it out… I record my sets off a DJM, Record Out connected to the 1/8" stereo input of an old Dell PC running Windows 10. I then save the AUP3 file on a NAS, from which I reopen on an HP Probook running Windows 11, which is about a year old. It turns out that if I copy the file locally to my Probook instead of opening it directly from my fileshare, the dropouts don’t occur.
The issue I described earlier caused audio drops of a few 100’s of ms and had Googled it at the time. I remember seeing several users on different platforms (Reddit among others), as well as on this Forum (Audio dropouts on playback - #2 by Musicfan1353). The difference however is the dropouts occurred at random intervals and started to happen suddenly (likely after an Audacity update), while I was only using my Dell PC without the NAS. The issue did and still does not affect the file itself and the dropouts are not audible after exporting the audio to MP3. It probably has been fixed then, but when I experienced it yesterday, I concluded it had not. It<s quite a coincidence the same symptoms have reoccurred, despite there’s no actual bug.
Thanks for challenging me 