I just now joined and this is my first post. I am using an ASUS gaming-capable laptop, Windows 10, to record a digital copy of an LP vinyl record. I started on Audacity version 2.(something) which I had installed on this machine when I got it a few years ago. On playback I hear an intermittent gurgling effect when the sound level suddenly goes down in rests in the music. I compared it with a copy of the same record I made about 10 years ago on my previous computer, a refurbished Hewlett-Packard desktop running Windows 10 and an earlier version of Audacity. I used the same turntable, cartridge, preamp and stereo plug to get into the old machine, which has the same type of audio input jack as the new one. The playback of that old file matches the source perfectly. I looked at the waveforms side by side and they look distinctly different. The newer one appears to mute aggressively when the sound level from the source drops below a certain threshold, while the older one continues to show significant amplitude from the little bit of record surface noise during pauses in the music. That is my preference, recording the sound from the record player “as is.” Then I can experiment with cleanup tweaks and discard them if I don’t like the result.
Thinking only of the possibility of a defective input in Audacity, I naively uninstalled it and installed the latest version. The results are the same as before, which makes me suspect some audio fault in the computer. The old desktop is out of Internet service because of a possible security fault. As I write this I am attempting to restart it offline to check out its Audacity performance. I cannot remember the exact password I need to restart it but I may be able to crack it by trial and error. I did that just last year for an unrelated photo project and like an idiot I did not write down the rediscovered password.
In the meantime has anyone else had any problems resembling mine?