I’ve had a weird experience with Audacity. For years now, I’ve been recording my voice for social media vlogs on Audacity via a Rode Procaster and Scarlett Solo through my MacBook. I use my desk at the window end of our bedroom, but after a few years in the still-concrete new build , we decided to decorate. I wasn’t recording anything new during that, except to use my car for a few since it’s a good dead sound.
When we finished decorating, I began recording again, but the sound was full of reverb as if it was in a large hard hall. I tried options like placing wadding behind a large painting and behind the mic, making a slight improvement, but still pretty bad. Eventually I had to look to hardware and software for the problem. I wondered if Audacity had changed through recent updates. I was using 3.7.7.0, but I have an older version 3.7.3.0. When I used that, the sound improved a bit more but again, not completely.
I then used Garageband… CRYSTAL CLEAR! No presence of anything like reverb or echo.
Has anyone else noticed this? If not, how on Earth have I managed to get this result from Audacity?
If the recording sounds very different depending on the software used, there might be an effect activated in Audacity. Of course, you could disable this effect - but you probably don’t know what it is… so we do it the “hard way”.
While Audacity is not running, go to Finder, select the menu “Go To → Go To Folder (or Shift - Command - G)”, and paste the following in the dialog field: ~/Library/Application Support
You’ll see - among others - a folder called “audacity”. Grab it and drag it to the desktop (or to the Trash).
This folder contains all settings you ever had made to Audacity, and if it is not there, Audacity will make a new, “clean” one. You’ll lose all your settings.
If it then works, okay - if not, you can either use Garageband instead or try to find out what is causing the problem in Audacity.
It sounds to me like monitoring is turned on, causing the audio to be recorded over and over again. If monitoring is needed, plugging in headphones to disable the speakers would stop it.
This has happened before, and I had to check the Audio setup settings. I don’t know how I missed that, but in my defence, I never changed the settings, so why would it revert to ‘Built-in microphone’?? Maybe when I was on a Zoom? Again, I always use my Rode through the Scarlett. And Garageband is saving that setting without any problem.
DUUUUHHH! I’ll not tell you what my wife and granddaughter are saying now.
Thank you for your detailed reply, but I’m feeling extremely stupid now that I’ve discovered Audacity had reverted to ‘Built-in microphone’ and I hadn’t checked that.
. I am feeling SO dumb now! 