Audio dropping intermittently in podcast recording

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

I’ve been using Audacity to record podcasts for years but recently parts of my audio is dropping/distorting. I’m also recording video and the audio there is fine in those sections but I don’t see a rhyme or reason for the occasional and intermittent dropouts, only on my channel, not my guests audio which never gets degraded.

2

There are so many possible reasons for drop outs. It happens because the program can’t keep up with the audio.

Since it used to work fine, my first suspicion is that the operating system is busier than it used to be. New programs installed that hang around and take up memory and usage cycles. Review the startup programs to see what is automatically starting up that you don’t really need.

It could also be a failing hard drive. It used to be that when a hard drive had a write error, it would tell the operating system, and the system would mark that sector as bad and not use it any longer. Newer drives now do that internally, and never tell the operating system, which means things go along just fine until it fails catastrophically with no warning.

3

Thanks, I usually try to restart and keep my Macbook fairly lean but it is getting up in years so maybe it’s showing signs of age and usage.

4

You did not tell anything about your computer or your other equipment - how is everything connected? What version of the operating system, how much RAM,how much free space on your internal drive, etc.

The sound sample you supplied sounds like kind of a telephone conversation to me (a WhatsApp call or something similar). Then, the disturbances may come from there and may not have anything to do with your equipment…

BTW I am using an old MacBook Air from 2010 with macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra), 4 GB RAM aund Audacity 3.5.1 for recording vinyls. Editing is then done on an iMac with macOS 14 “Sonoma” and Audacity 3.6.4. Works great.

5

There’s dropouts and duplication on that … https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#How_can_I_record_without_small_skips_dropouts_or_duplications

I would try other recording software before splashing out on a new computer, e.g. Audacity’s free competitor OCENaudio, (which uses less computer memory and has multi-core support).