I have been getting a peculiar kind of echo on my voice recordings occasionally. Usually, a ‘Rescan devices’ resets things, but not now. The recording is ok for about 7 seconds, maybe 8, then it begins. It’s like my voice is being duplicated on and off, so there’s a piecemeal echo occurring. Very hard to listen to, so the track is useless. After a few more seconds it just gets worse. There might be a piece every now and then that sounds fine, but it’s only about half a second, a whole second at most, in between sounding like I have a stammer!
I wondered if it was a newer version, so I went back to older versions I had kept. Back to 3.7.3 but still same problem.
Recording through a Scarlett Solo with a Rode Procaster mic straight into a 2017 MacBook Pro.
You don’t really say if you are hearing the echo as you record, or if it is only later when you review the recording.
No, I don’t listen to it as I record, or I would get feedback. I’m not wearing headphones as I talk to camera. It’s after I’ve recorded a whole half hour transcript that I hear myself ‘stammering’.
So the whole recording, video and audio, has to be redone. Right pain.
What else do you use the computer for? Multi-Player Games? Skype? Zoom?
If you have headphones, plug them into the Solo. Make sure Audacity playback volume is turned all the way down. You may not like the look, but I bet the echo goes away.
Sound that goes into Audacity and comes back out again is late. This is why you can’t listen to the Audacity backing tracks with a simple connection when you’re trying to overdub — play or sing harmony to yourself.
I bet significant chocolate your interfering voice is Audacity bleedthrough and you picked bad pathways.
Koz
Thank you. I wondered if this would be any sort of solution, because it’s not a problem within the Scarlett Solo but rather the recordings.
But it got me thinking, and experimenting. I used Garageband instead of Audacity, and it had a weird nasal electric whine constantly, which only changed pitch when I tried to speak.
I changed to the internal mic for both Audacity and GarageBand and it recorded ok. So I reckoned it had to be the Scarlett or the input on the Mac. Went to a Focusrite forum, found an article on audio issues with MacOS, which said to delete the two audio plist files since they might have been corrupted and restart the Mac.
Problem solved! It was the Mac audio preferences needing reset.