Intermittent Blank Space in Signal When Digitizing LPs to PC

The attached pic show a couple examples. What could be causing this? There seems to be anywhere from one to three blank spot that show up in random location per album side. For now I have been manually deleting the dead spots. I’m running a Music Hall MMF-7.3 turntable with Ortofon Bronze cartridge, into a Vincent PHO-701 phono pre-amp, Marantz 2270 receiver Aux channel. The PC is Windows 11 with Audacity 3.1.3.

Best,
Kevin
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Try temporarily disabling your anti-virus and see if that makes any difference (test only - remember to re-enable your anti-virus).

It’s worth a shot. I’ll give it a try this weekend.:ok_hand:

For now I have been manually deleting the dead spots.

It’s better if you can prevent this because you are missing sections of audio.

Short [u]dropouts[/u] are more common and usually not as obvious as what you’re seeing, but you can still hear a “glitch”.

It can be difficult to track-down the cause.

It’s related to multitasking, and the operating system is ALWAYS multitasking even when you’re running one application. There are recording and playback buffers (like storage tanks). Audio data flows-into the recording buffer at a smooth-constant rate and when the operating system gets-around to it, the data is written to the hard drive in a quick-burst. If something “hogs” the system for too long you get buffer-overflow and a glitch. Whatever is hogging the system doesn’t necessarily have to be using lots of CPU time, it just has to hog it for a few milliseconds too long. (The playback buffer works the opposite way… It’s filled in a quick burst and the audio-data flows-out smoothly, and the “danger” is buffer underflow.)

I’m thinking I should have never “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11. This issue is about as recent as that. Maybe I’ll just uninstall 11. I tried temporarily deactivating Norton 360. Recorded an album and the issue remained. Ho hum.

Best,
Kevin

Also, check out How can I record without small skips (dropouts) or duplications?