Hi, I’m trying out Audacity and really enjoying the program, but I’m having an issue with the start of the playback, I allow a couple of seconds at the start of the recording, playback is fine,and then select that first section and silence it (Ctrl+L) to remove mouse clicks etc. but when I playback the first part of the audio is not playing (first word), it shows on the playback levels it just isn’t audible, no matter what I do even exporting, the odd thing is that when played on loop the start is there but only from the second iteration.
Try Pressing Stop and then press Play again - do you get sound straightaway ?
On one of my PCs (but not the other) I sometimes get a 2 second silent playback with the playback meters bouncing - and then the audio cuts in, I have a suspicion that it is something to do with the soundcard driver.
I particularly notice this when I leave Audacity for another app and then go back (in fact I left writing this just now to try and lo and behold the silent 2 seconds then normal audio output).
See this other thread posted recently: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/2-second-delay-on-first-playback/53310/1
This particular PC of mine (an SSD HP Envy with W10) also has another oddity - this time with record where it fades itself in over the first two seconds and then normal levels are achieved. I think that this too is the soundcard driver software trying to be “helpful”.
Update: Argh - testing this recording “feature” I now find it’s gone away - maybe the dricer was updated as part of a Windows update - who knows …
My HP Probook with W10 does not exhibit these “helpful features” and nor does my Macbook Pro running Mojave.
Peter.
The sound card makes some sense, except for the fact that, before I silence a section of the track there isn’t the playback issue.
I make a recording and start speaking at the 3 second point, “testing testing one two three”. Stop the recording and hit play I hear “testing testing one two three”.
I select the first 3 seconds on the timeline and press Ctrl+L, now press play I hear “ing testing one two three” the wave form shows activity for the first part “test” but no sound. This also occurs with using other editing features. Before editing I can hit play as often as I like no problems, but after an edit I lose this first bit of audio.
I had the same problem on a new Lenovo S540 laptop. I eventually fixed it by finding a pre-installed app called ‘Dolby audio speaker system’ which attempts to set equalisation and no doubt other parameters to suit what it thins the output is (voice, music, movie etc). Turning off all the effects cured the Audacity problem. I’ve seen other laptops with similar audio ‘improvement’ software.