On my Mac Studio with the latest Audacity (and before), about half the time, Audacity adds a blurp to the start of the track when recording. The input device is BlackHole 16ch.
Is that “blurb” audible while recording, or only at playback time? You might want to activate “audible input monitoring” (menu Transport → Transport Options → Enable audible inpit monitoring) to check this.
You can get a “click” at the beginning and end if there is a DC Offset. But I don’t know about a “blurp”. It’s usually a hardware problem.
“DC” is zero-Hz, It’s not audio and you can’t hear it but you can hear it when it suddenly kicks-in and kicks-out.
I monitor the recording (pass-through) and it is audible and on the recording. Sometimes I must restart 3 times to be blurp free.
Not a click. lasts much longer, and goes full scale.
Does the blurp happen when you record from a different source?
Strange… I’m still thinking it’s a hardware problem, unless you are recording streaming audio and there is no hardware involved.
What hardware are you using? i.e. A USB mic? An analog mic? An audio interface, etc.?
I’m pretty sure it’s not Audacity…
…On Windows there are optional “enhancements” like automatic volume control and noise reduction that cause all kinds of weird problems (before the audio gets to Audacity) but I’m pretty sure Mac doesn’t have that kind of thing.
(S)he writes “input device is BlackHole 16ch”. BlackHole is a redirection software to enable recording of audiostreams on a Mac.
However, I do not understand why (s)he would need the 16ch(annel) version. I’d suggest to download the 2ch-version. If (s)he can find a download for Soundflower 2ch, it would be interesting to hear whether this alternative software would work better. And we do not know what macOS version is used.
If the problem is recording from Youtube, I’d suggest to download the sound rather than to record it. For example, with JDownloader2.
I am recording from an app on my MacPro with BlackHole as the output. BlackHole2 gives the same blurp.
Recording stream audio. But the blurp can occur before the stream is turned on.
Here is a blurp. I stopped recording and resumed it. Stream was stopped. Took 3 tries to get a silent start.
Yes, I know how BlackHole (and Soundflower) work. You set the output which comes from your browser or any other application to “BlackHole”, and then select BlackHole as the input source for Audacity.
Have you checked whether this blurp is also there when you record using another program than Audacity (Garageband, for example)?
I really think that it has nothing to do with Audacity, but rather with a problem either of the Mac itself or with the streaming source. Can you test your setup with another Mac?
My work-around would be to start recording long enough before the actual start of the stream. But of course, this would only work if the source of the problem is not in the stream itself.