Hi all, I’m having issues trying to record in Windows. I’ll say up front that I’ve got a decent PC and I’ve made sure that no unnecessary programs are running. I’ve also disabled sound-activated recording.
I made a drum .wav file in a separate program and imported it into Audacity for a new project. It plays back fine in Audacity. However, when I record (I wanted to first lay the bass line down, then guitars, etc), I get intermittent quick (<1 sec) pauses at seemingly random times. I am listening to the drum track as I play and record the bass, which I can also hear. I’ve read that this is very demanding but I’ll say as an aside that I don’t understand how you can lay down tracks without hearing the other tracks too!
This ends up making it impossible to lay down a track over the drums because I’m depending on the timing to do it. It’s like playing with a drummer who has no sense of meter, but worse 
It really seems to occur randomly as I did manage to successfully complete a 30-sec portion with no skips. Strangely, when I played it all back, the bass track was delayed by a second or so even though I recorded them in time together. Maybe these two issues are related?
It seems to me like maybe the computer just can’t keep up with everything, but that seems surprising to me. I’ve used Audacity in the past with no problems on this same PC, but in the past I was simply hooking my instruments directly into the sound card ‘mic’ jack from a POD amp simulator (hardware, not software). That’s a bit of a pain so the big change now is that I bought a Focusrite Scarlett Solo thinking it would be easy plug and play. And while it does plug and play, I’m wondering if the fact that I’m now depending on USB is the issue? Does that sound reasonable? If that’s the problem, I don’t understand how anyone could use a sound interface like this without a super computer!
I’m hoping that maybe it’s something else that can be fixed with a few tweaks within Audacity, so if anyone has any advice I’d be very appreciative!