Odd and annoying clicking noise in recordings

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hello, as of lately, I been encountering clicking/popping noises in my recordings. I’ve been using my whole setup for almost a year, with the mic being about a year older, and this seems to be just a recent issue. I’m using a BLUE Snowball microphone with my iMac and running Audacity as the recording software. I never mess with any setting in the program besides the input volume at 75%, as its been for the past year. Its also noteworthy to mention I use a separate computer to capture game footage so no other programs on my iMac are running. Not exactly sure why this is happening, but maybe somebody could help before I aimlessly and probably stupidly buy a new mic. :confused:

2

If the clicking is at regular intervals, then the problem is probably not the mic.

Before going any further, shut down your computer completely and do a “cold re-boot”.

3

If you have lots of software that automatically starts when you start the machine like Skype or Chat, don’t let it do that, or close them when they start.

Koz

4

Thanks for the reply,

In regards to steve, it starts up a few minutes into recordings and only happens we I’m speaking, not during an silent moments.

In regards to Koz, nothing runs while I do a recording, I make sure everything is shut off prior to when I start.

The only thing I have done since then is update my Audacity to the most recent version. I noticed it was Audacity 0.6.1 so the might be the problem? I hope so. Anyway I’ll be running the mic while chatting with some friends online so I’ll see if it fixed itself.

5

I’m pretty sure there wasn’t/isn’t a 0.6.1. Get the latest Mac version (2.1.1) from here.

http://audacityteam.org/download/mac

Koz

6

So as of today I did an normal recording and hoped for the best. It actually worked! So here is what I did differently…

•I turned off my screensaver temporarily to never. I actually think this might have caused the problem since it booted on after ten minutes, around the time the pops started.

•Used the new updated version of Audacity

•Used a different USB port on the iMac

•Turned off Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Drive, and Wi-Fi

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I hopeful its fixed permanently now! :smiley: