Fuzzy/Dropping Out Recordings

I’m running Audacity 3.6.4 on a Windows 11 laptop. When I try to record some old vinyl to the laptop, the recordings sound fuzzy with the audio dropping out for a second. Even though I see that the 2nd track (stereo) is being received, I don’t hear it during playback.

The audio signal is coming from my stereo receiver through a DriverGenius, model AV202-B, USB Audio Capture device into the laptop. This did work fine with an older version of Audacity. I even tried it with a DigitNow! BR605-US-S device. This was better but not great.

Is this a software bug or am I better off spending the money on a turntable that will record straight to the laptop?

Make sure Windows “enhancements” are turned OFF. That can foul-up the sound in all kinds of weird ways.

Sometimes the so-called enhancements are enabled by default, or enabled with a Widows update, or applications like Zoom or Skype will sometimes enable them.

Normal dropouts are ricker. They are caused by interrupts and the operating system is always multitasking and interrupting even if you’re only running one application.

Sorry, what? You aren’t getting left & right?

Both Windows and Audacity should be set to 2-channel stereo.

Then if you are only getting one side it’s probably an analog problem and, you can unplug one side at a time and swap the left & right connections to track down the problem.

I don’t think that’s the problem. Do you have a setup where you listen to the analog, and does it sound OK?

DVDoug, thank you. I turned off the Windows enhancements and tried my 2 devices. The DriverGenius gave me the same problems but the DigitNow device worked great. I have read reviews the the DriverGenius device has stopped working properly after a while.