Left/Right volume glitch with multiple tracks

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

I have spent hours researching this issue and have not found a single relevant solution. I’m really hoping that someone in the Audacity community can help.

I’m using Audacity 2.0.5 on Mac OSX 10.9.2

The project I’m working on involves assembling many tracks of audio from different sources — USB Mic, Conference call recording, professional music tracks, MP3’s we ripped off of our old YouTube videos, tracks recorded with iPhones or cameras — into a single composition. What has been happening is the Left/Right output has been glitching out. (See screenshot.)
Screenshot 2014-04-30 16.24.40.png
I’ve been trying to eliminate variables which might be causing this:

All of the tracks by themselves (prior to importing into this project) do not have this issue.
When I select Solo on a track, that track plays back correctly.
When I play the music track (“BecVar Mus”) it doesn’t have this issue.
When I resample all tracks to be the same rate, it does not solve the issue.
When the music tracks are playing, things sound just fine, but when the vocal (talking) tracks are playing, it does.
Once I export to MP3 everything seems to sound fine.

Do you have any solutions coming to mind which might solve this?
Screenshot 2014-04-30 16.31.10.png

2

What happens if you click at about 2 minutes to right of time 0.0 in “Ocean”, hold SHIFT and press HOME on your keyboard to select from there to 0.0, continue to hold SHIFT then hold DOWN arrow to extend the selection down into the other tracks, then Generate > Silence?

Did you install Mavericks over a previous version of OS X? Some issues with audio applications can be solved by reinstalling OS X.


Gale

3

Hi Gale,

All of the tracks in question here already are accompanied by silence (empty space) around them.

This is fresh install of OSX 10.9 (not upgraded).

Lionel

4

“Silence” and “empty space” are not the same thing when Audacity is playing the file. Audacity has a bug that presents on Mac OS X where tracks whose actual audio does not start at time zero may create playback issues. Usually this is a crackling or distortion of some type.

So unless those tracks have clips at the start that are silent audio (flat lined audio, not just empty space with no audio), please try what I suggested.


Gale

5

Hi Gale, it would be an interesting test to see whether creating silence helps to resolve the issues. Thanks for that suggestion.