As an occasional user of Audacity I have only just updated to 2.0.4 and have hit a couple of problems. I am using Windows 7.
First, most times when I record, instead of getting stereo, I get the left channel recorded in both channels. The sound coming out of the speakers during recording is stereo but the recording level indicators show identical signals and the sound during playback is the same for both channels. This is easy to see because the stuff I am recording has quite different content in the two channels.
I have tried all the combinations of input sources in the input drop-down menu and have selected “2 Stereo Input”, also tried everything in the Windows “Sound” options.
My sound card is a very simple C-Media one - probably no better than mother -board sound, but it has worked with Audacity before.
The second problem is that recordings often suffer from a form of distortion which sounds like it is being played under water. There is no clipping during recording - I’m only recoding at about 25% of the allowable headroom. My sound card doesn’t have any facilities for echo or anything fancy like that.
The strange thing is that occasionally I manage a perfect recording with neither of these problems, without having changed anything. The first recording after switching on Audacity is sometimes OK, then it starts playing up. The problems occur whether I am recording on-line streaming audio or just from a CD in the PC.
I tried reverting to an old version (1.3.13) which is not meant for Windows 7 and it did the same.
I would be really grateful for some advice on this.
We’ll take the underwater sound first. You’re probably running into Windows Enhanced Services (Conferencing Echo Cancellation) You can turn that off. This service is environment and show dependent. If your show contains mostly voices, you may not notice it at all. It will destroy music.
You need to fill in a little more for the second part.
the stuff I am recording has quite different content in the two channels.
The stuff which is? Are you recording work other than internet audio? A very common problem which leads to similar symptoms is trying to plug a stereo device like a mixer into the Mic-In of a sound card. So tell us what you’re doing – down to model number if you have them.
@dch22 I deleted your other post that you added to another topic. You are not on Windows 8 and don’t have Beats Audio, so it is just confusing to post there.
The stuff I am trying to record is streaming audio from the internet so I’m not introducing anything from outside the PC via Line-in or Mic.
Its actually training stuff for choral singing where most of the content is in the left channel and the bass part that I have to learn is in the right channel so it is easy to hear and see the difference between the two channels.
I also get the problems when recording direct from a CD in the PC’s drive.
Regarding the distortion problem, I have investigated the Enhancements, sound effects, echo etc but I don’t seem to have any of these options in the Sound window or anywhere else. My sound card is a basic USB described as C-Media PCI Audio Device and there don’t seem to be any options to change.
I have attached a couple of files of the distortion. I know this sounds a bit like something is being overdriven but I have tried turning everything down to the point that Audacity no longer accepts it (get an “Error while opening sound device” message).
On the -1 to +1 scale of the display, this waveform, never goes beyond + or – 0.25.
Gale: OK about the removal of my other response, but I was responding to the original question which does not mention Beats Audio.
Also although the original question was specific to Win 8, you posted that “Windows 8 is almost no different to Windows 7 as regards audio behaviour.” implying that if it was not a problem with 7 it should not be with 8. I just wanted to point out that it does occur with Win 7 too.
Of course that is always assuming we are talking about the same sort of distortion!. Its difficult to describe – like a Honky Tonk splurge sound.
To clarify, the Windows tunnel sound can occur on all Windows Vista, Window 7 and Windows 8 machines that have sound card “enhancements” available for the motherboard audio.
“Beats Audio” (motherboard audio) produces corrupted audio even if you turn the above “enhancements” off.
Neither of the above problems are anything to do with Audacity. It records what it receives, and playback devices are free to corrupt its output if they wish to do so.
You’ve now said you actually have a USB sound card. Have you looked in that card’s own control panel for sound effects you can turn off? Most C-Media external cards have their own control panel. Look in the playback section. Look for balance controls that may be the cause of your problem.
Is this USB card intended for Windows 7? Does it have drivers for Windows 7?
Does the built-in sound card have the same problems? Have you recorded computer playback with that? If it does not have a stereo mix option, have you recorded computer playback with Device Toolbar set to Host=“Windows WASAPI”, output device=, input device=<your built-in sound card speakers(loopback)>, recording channels=“(2) stereo” ?
I’m lost. It’s described as a PCI device which is an internal plug-in sound card, but you also said it was external USB. Point to the web site where you bought it, or give us the model number so we can look it up.
Do you not have Stereo-Mix or one of the other techniques for self-recording?
I bet we can cure the CD music problem right away. Stop using live recording. I used CDex for a long time to rip sound files right from Music CDs. The quality is perfect CD quality because the sound is not translated multiple times. You can get iTunes for Windows to do that, too.
The sound clips have very strange distortion. Instead of clipping off tops and bottoms, you have actual waveshape distortion within the musical tones (attached). Normal blue waves are lumpy, wavy up and down. You have sharp discontinuities – and thousands of them.
Thanks Gale and kozikowski for your detailed replies.
I’m afraid I fed you some duff info - getting my terminologies mixed up:-
I do not have an external (USB) sound card. I lost a channel on my mother board sound about a year ago, and rather than get it fixed I just bought a simple sound card to plug into a PCI slot. It has five jack sockets and as far as I can tell there is virtually nothing about it that can be controlled or adjusted apart from level and balance.
I have checked via Windows that it has the latest driver. It has stereo mix which is what I have selected. I have nothing plugged in to it except the output to the speakers.
Does the built-in sound card have the same problems? Have you recorded computer playback with that? If it does not have a stereo mix option, have you recorded computer playback with Device Toolbar set to Host=“Windows WASAPI”, output device=, input device=<your built-in sound card speakers(loopback)>, recording channels=“(2) stereo” ?
Gale I guess this question doesn’t apply now, but should I be using Windows WASAPI with my sound card? I’m using MME at present as instructed in one of the stickys.
“Beats Audio” =motherboard audio". OK, I didn’t know that.
Kozikowski. Regarding recording CDs, I don’t need to do this normally. I was just proving to myself that the distortion was not source dependent.
I see what you mean about the strange mode of distortion - full of discontinuities, almost like sampling stops momentarily then leaps to where it should have got to before the pause. Must be a lot of high frequency content in those glitches, hence the strange sound.
I have just made a perfect recording, then repeated it without any change and its distorted. Time to tear some hair out I think.
Particularly if it comes and goes, you have an instability, not something broken.
This seems counterintuitive, but can you make it worse? Like start Photoshop and FireFox and Office and Angry Birds then try to make a recording. If the machine falls face-first into the mud, then it’s just not powerful enough to do all that.
There are some simple things to do that can help. Disconnect the network and suspend virus protection. Open the hard drive properties and defragment the drive. Audacity will not work into a highly fragmented drive – or one that’s too full. What is the size of C: and how much room do you have?
Obviously, close completely everything you’re not using.
Live audio is different from recalculating a spreadsheet or Photoshop blur because it can’t wait. If you can’t find room for this musical note you can’t hold your hand up and suspend everything while you find fresh blankets for the bed. The next note is coming right now and the machine has to be ready.
I used to have a C-Media USB card that called itself “C-Media PCI USB Audio” in the device list, so I guessed dch222’s was USB
So changing the balance does not correct the balance problem? Does it change the balance at all?
How have you checked that? Windows Device Manager rarely knows except for common motherboard devices, and sometimes thinks you have up-to-date drivers when they are generic Microsoft drivers that are not matched with the device at all.
WASAPI loopback should record from a motherboard, PCI or USB/Firewire card (but stick to 44100 Hz project rate). It was a suggestion that you try it, given the card’s own stereo mix recording is broken.
You should also check out Trebor’s link about skips, though checking about the card’s drivers is the first thing you should do.
Maybe try giving Audacity higher priority so it isn’t interrupted by other processes.
This seems counterintuitive, but can you make it worse? Like start Photoshop and FireFox and Office and Angry Birds then try to make a recording. If the machine falls face-first into the mud, then it’s just not powerful enough to do all that.
There are some simple things to do that can help. Disconnect the network and suspend virus protection. Open the hard drive properties and defragment the drive. Audacity will not work into a highly fragmented drive – or one that’s too full. What is the size of C: and how much room do you have?
OK, I’ve tried setting the priority to HIGH (won’t accept REALTIME).
Also running several other applications at the same time and switching off AVG virus checker. No difference to severity of distortion.
My PC is less than 2 years old – HP dual core thingy. 3.2GHz Pentium. 4Gb RAM. C drive has 820Gb free out of 920Gb and is 0% fragmented . Should be no problem there I guess.
So changing the balance does not correct the balance problem? Does it change the balance at all?
I don’t actually have a balance problem. The problem is that one stereo channel is being recorded on both Audacity channels. I should say “was” because that particular problem hasn’t occurred in the last couple of days while I have been fretting about the distortion.
However I have checked the balance controls and they are working OK.
How have you checked that? Windows Device Manager rarely knows except for common motherboard devices, and sometimes thinks you have up-to-date drivers when they are generic Microsoft drivers that are not matched with the device at all.
I have discovered that my sound card is a Logilink PC0027B which is CMI8738 based.
The driver download on the Logilink website only specifies up to Windows Vista so I have asked them whether there needs to be a separate download for Win 7 and if indeed it is compatible (though it seems to work OK).
However the link you have sent me does have a download for the CMI8738/Win 7. I am unsure whether the driver affects just the chipset or the whole board, which would mean it could affect different manufacturer’s boards in different ways. Perhaps you could advise me on that.
I am tending towards the conclusion that some process in the PC is interrupting the Audacity sampling process every few ms but can’t track down what it might be. I always keep the Start-Up stuff down to the bare 2 or 3 processes I need so can’t think there is anything running in the background.
If the problem was permanent it may be due to Windows default format for the stereo mix input being set to mono, but stereo mix would not normally have a mono choice.
Behaviours coming and going is often a good sign of a driver problem.
Your best bet would be Logilink drivers since you have established they make the card. But clearly given other Logilink drivers support Win 7, their drivers for your card do not explicitly do so.
If you get no satisfactory answer from Logilink, then you could try the CMI drivers. As Koz says, you can always roll back to previous drivers (in Device Manager).
That’s a useful tool.
However it showed that there are no problems with my PC in that respect.
Logilink have gone quiet on me so I tried to download the driver from CMI, but couldn’t open or run the file. Will pursue that later.
I think I am going to have to draw a line under this, at least for the time being as I am going to be away for a couple of weeks.
I am very grateful for all the help I have been given to try to tackle this problem, especially from Gale and Kos who have invested quite a lot of time and effort trying to sort me out.
Although we didn’t manage to crack it, hopefully the information you supplied to this post will remain and may help someone else with similar problems.
I had a WiFi driver which caused a click on audio at regular intervals, (the WiFi driver was demanding an excessive period of attention from the CPU during which the audio playback was neglected for a millisecond causing a recurring click).
Changing the WiFi driver solved this audio problem.
