Using Audacity 2.03 to record
Using a Behringer 2442 sound board without an amp
Using a guitar into a D/I box into the board out from the board via the CD out (rca connectors) into a 3.5mm converter into the laptop
laptop is a Toshiba Satellite running Windows 7 Home premium 32 bit, Celeron dual core cpu, T3000 @ 1.80GHz, 4GB RAM
My issue is that after a recording is made and playback has started the quality of the recording deteriorates. It begins fine then after about 2-3 seconds the bass and all low end in the recording begins to drop out and eventually all that is left is a tinny sounding recording as if it were recorded on acetone cylinders. obviously not good. Any ideas as to why the recording would start strong then fade out like that? It is happening on several recordings, so its not just a “one time settings” thing. Thanks for any help you can offer.
Thanks for the quick response. Unfortunately, all enhancements are turned off including the environment. All other settings have already been set as instructed. Any other ideas as to what could be causing the issue?
That “everything is OK for the first few seconds” thing is very very typical of voice conferencing processing. Video and audio conferencing hates music. The software sees a sustained musical note as air conditioning noise and tries to cancel it out – usually taking the song with it.
So if Windows isn’t doing it, you installed something that is. Do you have Skype? Audacity does no processing in real time and can only record what the computer presents to it.
Is the laptop input a pink mic port? It sounds like you have too strong a signal for that.
What input are you recording from in Audacity? If you are recording from stereo mix (which you shouldn’t be), this other Windows behaviour may be doing it Audacity Manual .
Koz - No, nothing like skype or anything on there. in fact, not even an on board camera. I’ll check for other similar programs, though.
Gale - The mic port is black, but I have been plugging (almost) directly into it via an RCA/3.5mm adapter. I have been recording in stereo, so that’s a setting I’ll change along with the communications setting. I’ll let y’all know how it goes and thanks again for the help.
In that case (it’s your only input) it probably guesses mono or stereo line level based on the rings on the jack. Those “dual” inputs usually do not give good quality. Whatever your current problem is, it may be better to get the input into the computer using a USB interface that has a dedicated line input.
I did not mean recording in stereo as opposed to mono, but the input device you are choosing in the third box in Device Toolbar . You should be choosing the port that you are connecting to, and not “stereo mix”, “What U Hear” or any other input that records computer playback.
Thank you all for all of the help. I apologize, but I have just now been able to get back to recording. By right clicking the speaker icon and clicking on “recording devices” then right clicking on the microphone icon and selecting “properties” and clicking on the “enhancements” tab i was able to uncheck the boxes marked “DC offset cancellation”, “Noise suppression” and “acoustic echo cancellation”. this cleared the problem up. Thank you again to everyone and i hope all future fixes are this easy.
I’d be inclined to turn back on the “DC offset correction” - this will ensure your signal is centred on zero.
If you don’t do it in hardware there you would probably need to do DC offset removal in Audacity (with the Normalize tool) immediately after capture and before any editing. It will save time doing it in hardware.